










































^ 

































\3 



* ^ 






£ -V 



V 









^> 















<v 






. 






























"W 



^ -^ 



* ^ 













uj* 




+* 



%4- 


















THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE 
CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



PUBLISHED BY 

JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW, 
^publishers to the anibcrsitg. 

MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON AND NEW YORK. 
London, - - Simpkin, Hamilton and Co. 
Cambridge, - Macmillan and Bowes. 
Edinburgh, - Douglas and Foulis. 

MDCCCXCIV. 



THE NATURAL HISTORY 

OF THE 



CHRISTIAN RELIGION 



BEING A STUDY OF THE DOCTRINE OF JESUS 

AS DEVELOPED FROM JUDAISM AND 

CONVERTED INTO DOGMA 



WILLIAM MACKINTOSH, M.A., D.D. 






NEW YORK 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

1894 



t>3. 









i 



< .- 



< , < * . ■ 



PREFACE. 



The attempt made in this volume to trace the origin of 
Christianity to the common religious instinct, working under 
the influence of natural forces and amid historical conditions, 
is not the first of the kind which has been made, and probably, 
or rather certainly, will not be the last. When, in accordance 
with the demands of modern science, the supernatural element 
is rejected, a problem is presented to the theologian which 
cannot be put aside — which urgently demands attention. For 
Christianity is there, a great historical fact, in its origin the 
most epoch-making which the world has seen ; a fact, therefore, 
which must be accounted for, one way or another, by the way 
of natural development, if not by the way of the supernatural. 
Attempts in this direction, made at a time previous to the rise 
of what is called " modern criticism," could only be partially, 
if at all, successful. The volume which is here placed before 
the public could not possibly have been written until the new 
criticism had so far done its work, and may be regarded as an 
outcome of that great movement. In saying this, however, the 
writer is of course aware that the materials for such a work are 
scattered everywhere in abundance, not only in books devoted 
to theological criticism, but also in the great body of general 
literature. 

In recent years many well-known works bearing on the 
natural origin and verity of the Christian religion have appeared 
in this country and on the continent. Of these the most 



VI* PREFACE. 

recent, so far as known to the writer, is the notable and 
masterly work of Professor Edward Caird on The Evolution of 
Religion, published after the present volume was all but ready 
for the press. Being thus nearly related in point of time, the 
two books might be expected to exhibit phases or sections, 
more or less allied, of present-day theological thought. But it 
will be found that between the two there is no affinity, except, 
perhaps in the general result, so that theologically they neither 
admit of comparison nor lend support, unless it be undesignedly, 
to each other. In dealing with the religious problem, they 
proceed upon independent lines, and follow a quite different 
mode of treatment. For, while Professor Caird's mode is 
mainly, if not wholly, speculative and philosophical, that here 
adopted is mainly, or rather wholly, critical and historical ; the 
history, be it observed, being such as is arrived at by submit- 
ting the canonical records to the ordeal and sifting of modern 
criticism ; these, in fact, being the only two modes in which 
the question can be approached. 

With consummate literary skill, and a perfect command 
of philosophic thought and idiom, Professor Caird seeks to 
show that the simple teaching, the intuitive utterances of 
Jesus commend themselves to, and coincide with the pro- 
foundest moral views of modern philosophy. Now this fact 
(admitting it to be a fact) is deeply interesting, and cannot 
but be very satisfactory to every thoughtful Christian ; for 
it affords as high a confirmation as can be expected of the 
substantial truth of our religion. But even if so, the question 
still remains, " How did the ideas of Jesus arise and evolve 
themselves in his mind ? How did he advance beyond the 
wisdom of the ancients, Jew and Gentile?" Or, to put 
it differently, " How did he anticipate or discount the highest 
flights of modern thought ? " Plainly it could not be by 
any form or faculty of mysticism, for which, as Professor 
Caird incidentally remarks, the large claim has been made, that 
" it is the great means whereby a religious principle supple- 



PREFACE. VI 1 

ments the defects of its own imperfect development, or antici- 
pates the results of a more advanced stage than it has yet 
attained." For, even if this questionable claim be allowed, no 
tendency to mysticism is at all discernible in the teaching of 
Jesus. Was it then, as some will say, by supernatural illum- 
ination that Jesus rose to that height ? or was it rather by 
the reaction of his mind upon the inherited and environing 
conditions, social and spiritual, peculiar to Judea in his day ? 
The latter is the alternative which this volume has been 
written to establish. 

W. M. 

March 14, 1894. 



Note. — The effect of the anti- supernatural theory of divine action 
upon the orthodox dogma is summarily and somewhat abruptly indi- 
cated in the beginning of the third chapter of this book ; and should 
the reader wish to see a more detailed and qualified statement on this 
pointy he may be referred to the Appendix, which may best be read 
immediately after Chapter second. 



CONTENTS. 



Preface, pp. v-vii. 

CHAPTER I. 

Introductory, pp. r-18. 

The theological situation — Object of this book — Natural origin of 
Christianity — Successive stages of religious development — Miraculous 
element imaginary — Ultimate object of the "higher criticism" — The 
mythicizing tendency — Anti- supernatural theory of the universe — 
Method of procedure — Necessity for a fresh statement of critical re- 
sults — Weakness and inconsistency of the Protestant position — Alliance 
of the churches against scepticism — No middle way. 

CHAPTER II. 

Theory of Anti-supernaturalism, - - - pp. 19-55. 

Prehistoric period of Christianity — Basis of negative and positive 
criticism — Impossibility of miracle — Various views on the subject — 
Newman — Kuenen and Huxley — Duke of Argyll — Archdeacon Wilson — 
The supernatural inconsistent with the idea of development — Scientific 
theory of the divine action — The human element — Two objections to 
the scientific theory — Statement of the anti-supernatural position — 
Further discussion of the second objection — Introduction of Christianity 
not a breach of continuity — No new element added to human nature — 
The phenomena no exception to common law of the universe — Tendency 
to trace religious revolutions to the direct action of the divine power — 
Hesitating statements of many writers — Difficulty of removing super- 
natural element from evangelical narrative — Free treatment of records 
necessary — Conjectural element — How far legitimate — Historical value 
of the Gospels. 



X CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER III. 

Jesus simply a Teacher, pp. 56-83- 

Consequences of the anti-supernatural theory — Jesus simply a 
teacher, but in the widest sense— Regarded by the Church as a 
Redeemer— This idea at variance with his teaching — Exceptional 
utterances — No supernatural inspiration — Jesus made no claim to such 
— His teaching appealed to moral nature of man — His relation to his 
age — His genius — His teaching practical, not speculative — Relation of 
religion to philosophy and to science — Doctrine of Jesus autosoteric — 
Came not to destroy, but to fulfil. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Rise and Growth in Israel of Idea of Kingdom of God, pp. 84-132. 

Relation of Christianity to Judaism — The Exodus — Israel's adoption — 
Mythical element in the history — The Mosaic law — Idea of the covenant 
— Hopes of the nation — The prophets — Their adaptation of legend and 
chronicle — Their principles — Their method — The Messianic prophecies 
— Prophetic interpretation of the national calamities — Opposition of the 
prophets to polytheism — Their attitude towards ritual — Their concep- 
tion of moral government — Their hopes for the future — The idea of a 
Messiah — Idea of Son of God — Idea of suffering servant of God — 
Influence upon religion of the Messianic hope — The exile — The Levi- 
tical code — Its influence upon religion and national life — The book of 
Daniel — The Pharisees — Development of theological thought in Israel 
— Idea of immortality. 

CHAPTER V. 

Transformation of this Idea by Jesus, - - - pp. 133-157. 

Barrenness of the four centuries preceding Jesus — Religious thought 
paralysed by idea of visible Kingdom of God— John the Baptist— Con- 
trast between ideas of Kingdom of God held by John and by Jesus- 
Novelty of the idea taught by Jesus — Far-reaching nature of his doctrine 
—Its relation to the religion of Israel— The necessity of self help- 
Help from without not excluded — The forgiveness of sins— Autosoteric 
nature of his doctrine— His attitude to the Messianic idea— The central 
truth of Christianity. 

CHAPTER VI. 

Legal or Pharisaic Idea of Righteousness and of the 

Religious Relation, - - - . . . - pp. 158-173. 

Tendency to formalism in religion of Israel — Reaction of Jesus 
against doctrine of Pharisees— The Essenes— Jerusalem the head- 



CONTENTS. xi 

quarters of Pharisaism — Minute regulation of Pharisaic life — Tendency 
to encourage hypocrisy — Tendency to multiply ceremonies — Rise of 
learned castes — Absence of sympathy and charity — Exaltation of exter- 
nal conformity — Pharisaic view of the Sinaitic covenant. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Evangelic Idea as Taught by Jesus, - - - - pp. 174-214. 

Righteousness of the heart — Originality of this idea — Symmetry of 
doctrine of Jesus — His moral courage — His ideal of humanity — His 
conception of the divine character — Source of his religious insight — 
Avenue by which he may have reached his conception of divine love 
and forgiveness — His conclusions verifiable by others — His soteriological 
doctrine the new element introduced into religion — Renovating power 
of his gospel — Necessity of the new ideal of humanity and the new con- 
ception of God — Doctrine of divine fatherhood distinctive of teaching of 
Jesus — Independent of Greek philosophy — Self-originating character 
of divine love — Influence of this idea upon spiritual nature of man — 
Absence of dogmatic element from teaching of Jesus — Educative influ- 
ence of belief in divine forgiveness — Restatement of the distinctive 
feature of doctrine of Jesus — Dependence of Christian ethics upon new 
view of religious relation. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

HOW FAR THE DOCTRINE OF JESUS WAS ORIGINAL,- - pp. 2 1 5-225. 

Minor importance of this question — Comparison of Jesus with his 
predecessors — Doctrine to be regarded as a whole — Originality only 
relative— Recognition of latent elements — Result of his personal genius 
working on prophetic lines — Possible connection with the Essenes — His 
superiority to the prophets. 

CHAPTER IX. 

That Jesus Claimed to be the Messiah, - - - pp. 226-246. 

Relation of the Messianic hope to the new religion — Early uncer- 
tainty of Jesus as to his own Messiahship — His doctrine independent of 
Messianic ideas — Beginnings of his Messianic consciousness — The outer 
warrant — Suspense and hesitation — Declaration of Peter at Cassarea 
Philippi — Its effect upon the mind of Jesus — Difficulties involved in the 
denial of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus — Development of that 
consciousness — Confidence in his own doctrine — Perception of his 
spiritual superiority— Assumption of the Messianic role— Influence of 
the belief in his Messiahship upon his disciples — Origin and growth of 
this belief— Reciprocity between Jesus and his disciples. 



xii CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER X. 
His Journey to Jerusalem and his Death there, - pp. 247-256. 

Reasons for the journey — Effect of his appearance upon the priests 
and Pharisees — His mental attitude in presence of danger— His own 
conception of the influence of his death — Sublimity of his heroism. 

CHAPTER XI. 

The Christophanies, pp. 257-297. 

Shock to the disciples of the crucifixion — Their rally — Orthodox 
explanation — Objections — Manifestation only to a few — Discrepancy of 
the narratives — Uncritical attitude of early Church — Self-contradictory 
conception of the risen body — Resurrection not necessary to vindicate 
God's supremacy — Faith of the early Church must be accounted for — 
Suggested explanations and objections to them — The Vision-Theory — 
Reasons for its rejection — Involves an expectation of his resurrection — 
Its frequent occurrence and sudden cessation — The 500 brethren — 
Vision-Theory does not necessarily invalidate the Christian faith — But 
belief in the resurrection explained apart from the Vision-Theory — 
Detailed consideration of the mental condition of the disciples — Revival 
of their faith in Jesus — Clearer perception of his Messiahship — Senti- 
ment of adoration — Conviction of his imperishable life — Feeling of his 
spiritual presence — Expression of this feeling in language of the senses 
— This explanation not open to objections to Vision-Theory — Compari- 
son of Galilean brethren with Greeks at Mykale — Literal interpretation 
of their figurative language — Conformity with Jewish ideas of the 
Messiah. 

CHAPTER XII. 

Mythical Transformation of Evangelic Tradition, pp. 298-328. 

Impulse given to the mythicizing tendency by the belief in the 
resurrection — Exaltation of the life of Jesus — Supernatural elements 
introduced — Analogous cases — Question of time — Growth of myth — 
Materials — Objections to the mythical theory — Desire to strengthen the 
authority of Jesus — External and internal evidences of Christianity — 
Desire to certify religious doctrines — All discussion suppressed in early 
Church — Parallel with other religions — Mythical tendency at work 
during life of Jesus — Absence of any central authority — Both gain and 
loss in admission of supernatural element — Belief in the second advent 
— Origin of this belief — Its influence — Summary of the tendencies which 
promoted the mythical process — Not specially a legend-loving age — 
Mythical process filled in details of life of Jesus — Educative value of the 
myth. 



CONTENTS. Xlll 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Relation of Myth to Dogma, pp. 329-340. 

Sense in which Jesus fulfilled the prophets — The ideal Israelite- 
Identification with Jesus — The dogmatic process — Relation of -myth to 
dogma — Relation of dogma of Paul to doctrine of Jesus — Conversion 
rather than development — No dogma in Old Testament or in synoptic 
Gospels — Its origin in mind of Paul — His probable collaborateurs — His 
defects — His genius — His service to Christianity — Functions of myth 
and dogma. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

Conversion of St. Paul, - pp. 341-367. 

Importance of Paul's influence upon Christianity — Causes of his 
conversion— His own view — His previous religious experience — Effect 
of contact with disciples of Jesus — His mental conflict — His apprehen- 
sion of the doctrine of Jesus — Association of his new view with the 
person of Jesus — His vision — His conversion sudden only in appearance 
— His perception of the universality of Christianity — Anticipated by 
Stephen — Universalism of Christianity not derived from universalism 
of Roman Empire — This element inherent in doctrine of Jesus — 
Different views on this subject — Paul's conversion a perfectly natural 
phenomenon — Distinction between the alleged visions of the disciples 
and that of Paul — Value of his testimony as to the others — Distinction 
between the spiritual experience of Paul and that of the first disciples. 



CHAPTER XV. 

His Doctrine of Atonement by the Death of Jesus, pp. 368-412. 

Paul's Pharisaism — Effect upon his mind of the new doctrine — Sense 
of personal obligation to Jesus — Difficulty of reconciling the death of 
Jesus with his Messiahship — Idea of atonement — Relation between 
doctrine of Jesus and that of Paul — Paul's knowledge of the facts of 
Jesus' life — His apparent inconsistency — His exaltation of the death of 
Jesus — Need for a sensuous representation of a spiritual truth — Con- 
version of the autosoteric into a heterosoteric process — Influences 
tending to this — Paul's declension from the doctrine of Jesus— Peda- 
gogic value of Paul's dogma — Its anti-legal spirit — Atonement the 
central principle of the dogma — Its relation to modern ideas — Its 
particularism — Distinction between the religion of Jesus and the 
Christian religion — Confusion in Paul's scheme of doctrine — Hellenistic 
and Jewish ideas — How far the former influenced Christianity. 



xiv CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Pauline Dogma as Involved in that of Atonement, pp. 413-440. 

Doctrine of atonement involves superhuman nature of the Messiah — 
Ascent to the idea of his divinity — Motive principle of the dogmatic 
development — Pauline anthropology — Literal meaning of Paul's language 
— His soteriological doctrine — Justification by faith — Criticism of the 
doctrine — Paul's modifications of it — Difficulty of defining the relation 
between the Law and the Gospel— Paul's responsibility for Antinomian- 
ism — Dissatisfaction with his own dogmatic system — Final view of the 
relation between Jesus and Paul — Practical influence of the Pauline 
dogma. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

Conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, pp. 441-464. 

Opposition to the Pauline dogma — Jewish and Gentile Christians — 
Points of agreement and of difference — Difference in the spiritual ex- 
perience of Paul and of the other Apostles — Difference between his and 
their views of the atonement — His conception of Christian liberty — 
Exclusiveness and intolerance of the Jewish Christians — Dissensions in 
the Church — Vacillation of Peter — Paul's rabbinical use of the Old 
Testament — Epistle to the Hebrews — Distinction between Paul's view 
and that of the author of that epistle — Inconclusiveness of both their 
arguments — Schism averted — Irenical tendency in books of New Testa- 
ment — Mutual concessions — Substantial triumph of Paulinism. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

Post-Pauline or Gnostic Period, pp. 465-490. 

Rise of Gnosticism — Dualistic theory of the universe — Its tendency 
to foster both asceticism and licentiousness — The deutero-Pauline 
epistles — Their modification of Paul's doctrine of justification by faith 
alone — Gnosticism partly an exaggerated reaction against Judaism — 
Development of the Pauline Christology — Gentile tendency to poly- 
theism — Revival of dasmonism among Gentile Christians — Derogatory 
views of the person and work of Christ — Christianity removed from the 
practical into the speculative sphere — Gnosticism partly an exaggerated 
development of Pauline ideas — Reaction against Gnosticism — Relation 
between pre-Christian Hellenism and deutero-Paulinism — How far the 
deutero-Pauline epistles were intentionally anti-Gnostic. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

The Fourth Gospel, pp. 491-577. 

Relation of the fourth Gospel to the Gnostic heresy — Two main 
theories as to date and authorship of the Gospel — Internal and external 



CONTENTS. XV 

evidence — Self- referent character of the discourses of Jesus as given in 
the fourth Gospel — Identification of Christ with the Logos — Opposition 
of the Jewish Christians to the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus — 
Attempt of the fourth Evangelist to solve the Gnostic problem— His 
combination of Pauline Christology with the Gnostic doctrine of the 
Logos — Other traces of Hellenistic influence in the fourth Gospel — 
Difference between the Alexandrian doctrine of the Logos and that of 
the fourth Evangelist — Use of the word Logos in the Apocalypse — Its 
use in pre-Christian Jewish literature — How far the Logos of the fourth 
Gospel is derived from that of Philo — Development of the Paulinistic 
Christology into that of the fourth Gospel — Necessity felt by the 
Evangelist for a new gospel — His motives in composing it — Unhistori- 
cal character of the fourth Gospel — Its attempt to supply the deficiencies 
of the others — Its treatment of the miracles and discourses of Jesus — 
Considerations which might make such procedure seem justifiable to 
the author — His idealization of the person of Christ — The self-testimony 
which he makes Jesus bear — No trace in the fourth Gospel of any 
growth in the consciousness of Jesus — The miracle at Bethany — The 
cleansing of the temple — Date of the crucifixion — Indifference of the 
Church to all discrepancies — Uncritical reception of the fourth Gospel 
— Artistic realism of the work — Other circumstances tending to secure 
its reception as genuine — Anonymity of the work — Genius of the author 
— His universalism — Influence of the fourth Gospel upon the Church — 
Doctrine of the Holy Spirit 



CHAPTER XX. 

Conclusion, pp. 578-589. 

Further development of Christian doctrine — Difference between 
Pauline and Scholastic dogma — Analogy between the histories of 
Christianity and of Islam — Treatment which has been given to the 
historical data — In what sense Christianity is of divine origin — Justifi- 
cation of the attempt to present an anti-supernatural explanation of 
Christianity. 

APPENDIX. 

Application of the Theory of Anti-Supernaturalism 

to the Christian Dogma, - - - - - - pp. 590-607. 

The anti-supernatural theory involves the rejection of the cardinal 
Christian dogmas — Jesus only a man — His sinlessness only relative — 
He had no miraculous powers — Explanation of his " moral therapeutic " 
— His alleged prophetic utterances — His alleged resurrection— Question 
of immortality. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

In the agitated and uneasy state of theological opinion, which 
has prevailed during a great part of this century, the revered 
ideas and traditions of the past have been thrown into the 
crucible to be recast, or have been submitted to tests previously 
unthought of. In view of this fact the question is often asked, 
"What does it all mean? To what is it all tending?" As 
the tendency of modern criticism is to reduce, or entirely to 
get rid of the supernatural element of Christianity, this vague 
question, expressive of general bewilderment, may be translated 
into another and more specific question, viz., Whether Chris- 
tianity can be accounted for on the supposition that there is no 
such element in it ? In this latter and more specific form, this 
question is undoubtedly the most urgent in the whole field of 
present day theology ; and it is manifest that, to be of any 
scientific or other value, negative or positive, any attempt to 
answer it, such as is to be made in this volume, must be 
thorough, i.e., it must do full justice to the supposition from 
which it starts, and carry out that supposition to its conse- 
quences without faltering or reserve. 

So conducted, the discussion may have one of two results 
— either it may discredit the supernatural theory of Christianity, 
or it may go far, in the way of a reductio ad absurdum, to 
demonstrate the untenableness of the anti-supernatural theory. 
Each reader will have to judge for himself, according to the 
impression made by the discussion upon his mind, to which 
of these alternatives it has led him. In any case it will do 
somewhat to put the latter theory to the touch, and bring 
the reader face to face with difficulties which, by being evaded 



2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

or kept in the background of thought, produce an uneasiness 
and perplexity that distract the mind of the Church, and go 
far to shake the authority of Christianity and to impair its 
influence. 

The writer is persuaded that the prevalent drift toward anti- 
supernaturalism can never be arrested until the case for it is 
fully and fairly stated, and is found to break down. The 
wriggling efforts of the usual apologetic sort to arrest or 
retard this drift will continue, as heretofore, to be unavailing. 
It may indeed be that the case for anti-supernaturalism, so far 
from breaking down, may prove to be good and valid. But 
even should it be so, the Churches may be expected to look 
upon the discussion with candour, and even with favour, pro- 
vided it be also found, that, discharged of the supernatural 
element, Christianity may yet remain a valuable possession 
of humanity, a religion fitted to guide and allure men to the 
higher life. To arrive at such a result, would, it will be con- 
fessed, be an immense relief to all who have the interests of 
religion at heart, and are able to form an intelligent estimate 
of the modern phase of the religious problem. 

It is not, of course, in the power of the author, to limit 
the circle of his readers, but he may be permitted to say, 
that this volume is not intended for those who find support 
for their spiritual life in any of the popular orthodox forms 
of Christianity. Nothing can be further from his intention 
than to unsettle the beliefs of those who can honestly make 
this avowal. He would even deprecate its perusal by any 
such. But some risk of this kind must be run, unless we 
choose to proceed upon the maxim (acted on by orthodox 
Mahometans, as well as by orthodox Christians, and, indeed, 
by the orthodox of all denominations) of abstaining from every 
attempt to revise the doctrines which have come down to us 
as a heritage from our forefathers. 

The volume has been written partly for the comparatively 
few who take an abstract interest in the ascertainment of 
truth in the religious sphere, but chiefly for the many whose 
belief in Christianity, by contact with the inquiring or scep- 
tical spirit of the age, is already unsettled, and who find, in 
their quest of a religion, that the antagonism, real or apparent, 
between science and the orthodox forms of Christianity makes 
it impossible for them to be satisfied with any of these. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 

The pale of orthodoxy may fairly be held to include all 
professors of Christianity who accept of its miraculous ele- 
ments, or regard the New Testament in part, or in whole, as 
a specially inspired volume. At the present day, the con- 
fessional differences between the various sects go for very little, 
and have little or no significance for the spiritual life. The 
insistence upon these differences is chiefly calculated to per- 
petuate the existence of rival organizations ; to maintain the 
status quo in the relative strength and distribution of the sects ; 
and to delay for another generation the impending crash of the 
several dogmatic systems, by which the mind of Christendom 
has been dominated for so many ages. 

More than a century has elapsed, since one of the leading 
spirits of the time, a devout believer in the miraculous nature 
of Christianity (Dr. Johnson), gave it as his opinion that "all 
Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential 
articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political 
than religious." Few at that time shared in a sentiment so 
candid and sensible. But in the interval, the thoughts of 
men have widened and advanced so far, that now there are 
multitudes in the leisured and better educated classes through- 
out Christendom who are wholly unable to accept of Christianity 
as a supernatural system. Of these, . many have entirely re- 
nounced the Christian profession. But others, and perhaps the 
much greater number, claim to be Christians still, because they 
feel that the orthodox form of Christianity is an accident, and 
that Christianity is identified with a profound truth, more or 
less underlying all the creeds, which appeals to man's inmost 
nature and supplies the necessary aliment to his spiritual life. 
And though the immediate object of this volume is not so 
much to prove the truth of Christianity, or to indicate wherein 
its essential truth lies, as rather, to trace its historical genesis, 
yet the writer is persuaded that its essential truth will best 
appear, incidentally or inferentially, in the course of such an 
inquiry. 

The title of the volume will suffice to show that it is written 
on the lines of the great critical movement which has gone on 
in theology for the greater part of this century, and that it will 
be largely negative in its scope. At the same time, the writer 
wishes it to be understood from the first that, by intention at 
least, the volume is constructive, and, in the larger sense of the 



4 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

word, even apologetic. This will be readily recognized by 
some, if not by all, of its readers. Indeed, had the views of 
the writer been merely negative, offering nothing in place of 
what was removed or discarded, he would have hesitated to 
lay them before the public. But he is encouraged to do so 
because he believes that, by abandoning indefensible positions, 
and, in particular, by dissolving the connection of Christianity 
with miracle of every kind, it may be made to present a 
stronger front to the world ; that when this just cause of 
offence is removed, the intellect, which has been stigmatized 
as a " universal solvent," will cease to be aggressive and 
capricious and become friendly in its attitude. 

With this conviction he will attempt to show that Christi- 
anity took its rise in a great spiritual and religious movement 
among the Jewish people, or in a great transformation of 
Jewish ideas effected by Jesus, and spreading from him to 
his disciples ; and to find in that movement and in certain 
favouring circumstances and historical conditions, without look- 
ing beyond to any supernatural or transcendental causes, an 
explanation of the whole relative phenomena. He will treat 
Christianity as an outgrowth of the human mind, and, there- 
fore, as in no sense miraculous, but yet as a revelation of the 
divine in so far as it has brought to light the true secret, the 
idea, and the goal of humanity. He believes Christianity to 
have been founded, proximately, in the great religious experi- 
ence which befell Jesus in its purest form, and was reflected 
in his life and teaching. He believes that that experience 
was transmitted and propagated to the minds of his disciples, 
not, however, in its pure and original form, but through the 
medium of the impression made by the personality of Jesus 
on their emotional nature ; and that that impression, acting 
on their imaginative and ratiocinative faculties, was what gave 
to Christianity the mythical and dogmatic construction which 
is presented to us in the New Testament and in the creeds of 
the Churches. 

There are three propositions, the truth of which will be 
made to appear in the following pages. First, that Judaism 
and Christianity denote the successive stages of one long 
evolution of religious thought and sentiment. The underlying 
fact of a grand religious movement is the key to the whole 
following discussion, a fact without which the literature and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 

history of Israel and of the early Church would be an insoluble 
enigma, a fortuitous development. Secondly, that the phases 
of this long evolution in its decisive moments have been largely 
recorded in the form of myth and dogma, so that a miraculous 
aspect has been imparted to the evolution, which in itself went 
on naturally and rationally, or according to the laws of our 
spiritual and social nature. And, thirdly, that the myth and 
dogma have mingled as important factors in the evolution 
itself. 

By the first of these propositions it is not meant that the 
evolution dates its origin from Judaism, but rather that it 
reaches back to a long anterior time. Few great thoughts 
which have dawned upon the minds of men have been lost ; 
and the salvage of one religion in its decay and senescence 
may have formed the stock with which another has started on 
its course and entered upon its new career. If it be the case, 
and no one can doubt it, that Christianity was rooted in the 
religion of Israel, and was the heir of all that was best in it, 
there is little less certainty, though it has been disputed, that 
the religion of Israel was under deep obligations to that of 
Egypt, that is, to the most ancient civilization of the world ; 
so that the religious development, which has culminated in 
Christianity, was coeval in its origin with the earliest dawn 
of intelligence. The evolution of the religious principle has 
had as many illustrations as there have been historical religions 
in the world. Theologians have undertaken to trace the origin 
and growth of religion as illustrated by that of ancient Egypt, 
of China, of India, of Scandinavia, and even of Mexico and 
Peru. But it may be remarked generally that in all these 
cases the evolution turned aside into a terminal, or stopped 
short of the higher reaches of religious thought. There was 
much common to all of them with Judaism and Christianity, 
but it admits of being said, with every appearance of truth, 
that these latter began where those others left off. And the 
higher development in the exceptional cases of Judaism and 
Christianity was probably due to a new ethical impulse, which 
gave them a fresh start. The predominance of the ethical 
element kept them upon the right line of development, or 
enabled them to regain the line after every temporary diver- 
gence. Thus it was that Christianity arose by the self-assertion 
of the moral nature in Jesus, and that the Reformation of the 



6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

sixteenth century was due to a similar cause in the mind of 
Luther and his predecessors. 

The miraculous element which, according to the second of 
the above propositions, runs through the records of the great 
evolution, is traceable to the imagination of the peoples, or of 
individual writers, during a period in which the direct interven- 
tion of the divinity was called in, without scruple, hesitation, 
or misgiving, and at the dictation of pious feeling, to explain 
everything that was out of the common course. The religious 
movement as it went on from age to age created for itself a 
miraculous history, just because it knew not how otherwise to 
place itself on record. Underlying the miraculous records of 
the Old and New Testaments there is the secret history of that 
great, non-miraculous religious movement which was of secular 
duration and ran through many stadia. This movement, as 
presented in the records, is woven into one with historical 
events. Men who were conscious of the movement, or took 
part in it, moulded the history, so as to make of it a vehicle 
and a sanction for the religious idea. So far as this was done 
consciously it was owing partly to the fact that the historical 
sense was not developed in their minds, and partly to the fact 
that the religious interest largely predominated. And it is 
obvious that by this treatment both the history and the idea 
would be made to suffer. The history was veiled, not to say 
distorted, and the idea came to no pure or adequate expression. 
The historical records do not so much show the phases of the 
religious evolution as rather the religious standing of the writers 
who compiled them as a vehicle for the utterance and propaga- 
tion of their own religious ideas. From which view of these 
documents arises a most important inference for theological 
science. The mixed nature of the documents determines the 
ultimate aim and object of what is called the " higher criticism," 
as applied to them. This can be nothing short of tracing and 
following out the course of the underlying history, and of dis- 
covering, if not exactly, yet approximately, how those who took 
part in the salient or creative periods of the movement — or 
rather, perhaps, how those who came after conceived of these 
as periods of special divine interposition, and handed down the 
memory of them in narratives which imparted to them their 
miraculous colouring. We can only hope to discover approxi- 
mately how this took place, because our sources of information 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 7 

are too scanty to admit of exact knowledge, and also because 
of the possible variations in the development of human thought 
and action under given conditions. 

Once admit the rationale of the myth and its function in 
shaping the history of religion which we shall have an oppor- 
tunity of explaining, and we may be prepared to find it every- 
where as a never absent feature of the history in all its stages, 
an invariable element of the literature which the religious 
movement called forth. Men, who, like the Israelites, regarded 
all events as evidences of the direct operation of God in the 
world, would seek to represent the national fortunes generally, 
as illustrations of divine action, more palpable than they really 
afforded. And this endeavour, unconscious no doubt, would 
be a source of many mythical narratives which had no direct 
bearing on the religion. But any stir or movement in the 
religious life of the people would call the mythicizing tendency 
into its most lively action. When such was the case, the 
annalist or historiographer would have recourse to the super- 
natural factor to explain it. Only when the religious life of 
the people was flat, commonplace, or stagnant, would the 
record become prosaic, and decline into plain, unvarnished 
history. But at an epoch-making period, the mythicizing 
tendency would revive, and seek not only to represent the 
epoch itself, as something marvellous and preternatural, but 
also to revive and colour the history of preceding times, so 
as to make of them a prophecy of the new power, which 
had entered into the national life, and so to establish a certain 
unity between the past and the present, such as befitted a 
divine revelation. 

In adopting the anti-supernatural theory of the universe, 
the writer must not be understood as questioning that a 
divine power moves in all nature and in all history, but 
only as denying that such a power moves in a sphere beyond 
and outside of nature. Granting that there is a supernatural 
element common to all phenomena, he denies that, in any 
phenomena whatever, physical or spiritual, there is such an 
element over and above what is common to all alike ; or that 
there are certain classes of phenomena, which are supernatural 
in a sense and to a degree which other classes are not. 
Further, in denying the specially supernatural character of 
Christianity, he is far from denying the existence of a great 



8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

mystery in its genesis and constitution. " Gehcimnisse sind 
noch keine Wunder." 

It is only the situation and nature of the mystery that 
are shifted. For it seems to him to be a thing much more 
mysterious, much more inaccessible to the human under- 
standing, that a divine idea, which commends itself as such 
to reason and conscience, should work itself out through the 
uniform operation of natural and psychological law, than that 
it should do so through the occasional operation of some 
supernatural and exceptional agency. Through the operation 
of natural laws, the supreme power whose will resides in 
these laws, or is identical with them, brings to pass results 
so marvellous, so unexpected, so much apart from ordinary 
routine, that men regard them as the work of a power which 
is above law, and proceed to construe and interpret them on 
that hypothesis. This is the dogmatic or symbolical con- 
struction of the mystery, which is not thereby enhanced, but, 
on the contrary, reduced, that we may not say degraded, to 
the level of human comprehension. No doubt, it may be 
said that, if the presence and action of a divine power, working 
out its own ends, through the operation of natural laws, be not 
denied, it does not much signify where that action is placed, 
or how it is conceived of; but the writer agrees with those 
who contend on the contrary that, in the presence of modern 
scientific thought, it has become a vital necessity for religion 
to acknowledge divine action only in the form and through 
the medium of natural law, physical and spiritual, and to have 
it understood once for all that the supernatural aspect, given 
in Scripture to divine action, is only the naive representation 
of its natural, but recondite character, the form in which it 
presents itself to the unscientific mind. 

The reader need not expect to find in the following pages 
anything of the nature of a history of the nascent Church, 
nor of a " Life of Jesus " : for which, indeed, in the strict 
sense of the word, existing materials are far too scanty ; 
though, during the last half century, many works with that 
title have been placed before the world. The author proposes 
to enter as little as possible into historical and exegetical 
details. He will pass lightly over many points which are 
largely discussed in such works as those just mentioned, or 
he will altogether omit them, because of their collateral and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 9 

subsidiary character. He will also avoid, as far as possible, 
all points in regard to which, as it seems to him, historical 
and literary criticism has arrived at no very definite result : 
not by way of making out a special and one-sided plea for 
the views which he holds, but by way of confining attention 
to the broader aspects of the subject, and of dwelling fully 
on those particulars on which the genesis and early develop- 
ment of Christianity, which it is his object to trace, seem to 
hinge. Even these it is impossible to discuss within the 
compass of a single volume, without taking for granted the 
reader's acquaintance to some extent with the general results 
and methods of modern criticism. The writer, however, will 
not presume upon such acquaintance more than he can help, 
but endeavour, as far as possible, to write in a manner in- 
telligible to the general reader, especially avoiding the details 
of textual exegesis, and even of literary and historical criti- 
cism, except in so far as these may be necessary to elucidate 
the line of argument. 

The work may be said to consist of two parts, the one 
negative, and the other positive, which, however, pass and 
repass into each other without being divided by any line of 
demarcation. As the former is wholly, or largely, a summing 
up of certain results which have been pretty well established 
by the literary and historical investigations of the present 
century, it contains comparatively little that will be novel or 
fresh to the well-informed reader. But there is a necessity 
to place, even before such a reader, much that he is familiar 
with, in order to present a comprehensive view of the subject, 
to define the writer's standpoint, and to clear the ground for 
the positive sections of the inquiry. And it is hoped that 
these latter sections may be found to contain so much of a 
fairly original character as may, to the competent judgment, 
justify the writer in laying his views before the public. 

He believes that the results of modern criticism are here 
applied, in a way never before attempted, to the solution of 
the problem indicated in the title ; and also, that the general 
results of that criticism may receive confirmation, when it is 
seen that they really do yield such a solution. While he 
admits that, on many of the critical questions to be touched 
upon in the following discussion, the last word has not yet 
been spoken, he may at least say that his general estimate 



10 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of the results of Old and New Testament criticism is the 
best approximate which he has been able to form. There 
is an evident intention and endeavour on the part of apolo- 
gists to belittle, or restrict and narrow these results. And 
if, against his will, the writer may be thought to have erred 
on the other side, it may yet be seen that the general 
validity of this discussion is not dependent on the absolute 
correctness of all its details. 

He is strongly persuaded that some such work as that 
here attempted is called for by the state of modern criticism, 
in order that its results may be placed before the public in 
one connected view, and were it only to state the case 
which it seeks to establish against the supernatural origin 
and constitution of Christianity. Provided the case be a 
weak one, the fact will, by such a connected view, be made 
to appear in a clearer light than it can be by any detached 
portion of the evidences ; while, on the other hand, if the 
case is a good one, the mere attempt to present such a 
connected view cannot fail to throw light upon many ob- 
scure passages in the great evolution of religious thought of 
which Christianity is the outcome. There are many passages 
in that evolution, the obscurity of which for the critical, 
that is the reasoning and inquiring mind, is not dissipated 
by the copious infusion in the primitive records of the 
supernatural element ; and as little is it relieved by any 
treatment or interpretation, however modern, of these docu- 
ments which leaves that element standing. 

It is not without a trembling sense of responsibility that 
the writer ventures to place such a work as this before the 
public. But he is emboldened to take this step by the 
consciousness that he is actuated by concern for the interests 
of religion, and by the conviction that these interests are 
better served, in . this age especially, by a creed which, 
scanty as it may seem, yet rests upon an appeal to reason 
and experience, than by one embracing articles which, how- 
ever endeared to us by old and tender associations, yet rest 
upon a foundation of questionable solidity, and give occasion 
to so much scepticism among men of thought both in 
Catholic and in Protestant countries. 

This is the main consideration which justifies a work of 
this kind. But a minor, though still important consideration 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I I 

is, that the supernatural element disguises the nature of 
Christianity and is the source not only of endless diversity 
of opinion regarding its doctrines, but also of interminable 
feuds between the various Churches which are agreed in 
accepting that element. It was the element to which the 
early Church had recourse to explain to itself whatever was 
phenomenal or mysterious in its own experience ; and by 
retaining it in their view of Christianity, theologians of all 
schools and of all ages have had at their disposal an unlimited 
choice of conjectural possibilities by which to reconcile all 
discrepancies in the records, and to smooth away all the 
difficulties which their several views present to the critical 
judgment. 

Catholic and Protestant alike can avail themselves of these 
possibilities, so that the controversies between them can never 
be settled. It may also be confidently affirmed that Protes- 
tantism can never be able to hold its own, and still less to 
turn the apologetic position of the Roman Catholic Church, 
until it abandon the supernatural ground, which has hitherto 
been common to both. With its historical prestige, the 
Catholic Church will always have the advantage in contro- 
versy with any rival which clings to the supernatural element. 
For, if the admission be made that Christianity was given 
to the world by supernatural revelation, the presumption will 
always be strong, that this element takes part in its 
development as well as in its origin ; and in the growing 
clash and hubbub of opinion, the presumption will wax 
stronger and stronger, that tc oreserve the benefit of Chris- 
tianity, there must be somewhere a power in the world 
invested with the prerogative of infallibility, adapted " to 
smite hard, and to throw back the immense energy of the 
aggressive intellect," and in the absence of all other claimants, 
the Roman Catholic Church will hold the field. This 
position so ably and acutely maintained by Newman and 
other Catholic controversialists is impregnable. 

Considered as a supernatural system, Christianity is so 
expansive, so plastic, and, so to say, unstable ; capable, i.e. 
of being shaped into such diverse forms by the breath and 
impact of human opinion, that if men have to determine 
what they should or should not believe, some final, outward 
and official authority seems to be a necessary adjunct of 



12 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the system ; necessary, that is, if change is to be resisted, 
doubts to be resolved, and unity among its adherents to be 
preserved. The importance and the difficulty of preserving 
unity in the faith began, as may be seen in the canonical 
epistles, to be early felt (cf. 2 Cor. xiii. II, Phil. ii. 2, Eph. 
iv. 3, etc.); and this feeling had much to do with the rise 
of the episcopate ; with the convocation of ecumenical 
councils ; and with the establishment of the Roman primacy : 
that is to say, with the whole course of ecclesiastical history. 

This craving for a central authority has descended to 
modern times, and menaces the stability of the Protestant 
Churches. It was what lured Newman and many others 
into the Catholic Church, whose claim to having the seat of 
authority within itself, besides the force which it derives from 
historical prestige, is also, as already said, indefinitely strength- 
ened by the fact that practically there is no other claimant in 
the field. And it can hardly but be admitted, that for Newman, 
starting as he did from a belief in the supernatural origin 
and dogmatic character of Christianity, secession was the 
natural and logical consequence. Scripture could not furnish 
the rule of faith which he craved, for it creates more con- 
troversies than it settles ; and men, whether educated or 
uneducated, who trust to private judgment, are able to find 
in it whatever they bring with them to its study. Besides, 
it can hardly be thought that God would first grant a special 
revelation of His will, and then stultify Himself by leaving 
men, with the book of revelation in their hands, as much at 
a loss as ever. The hope that this state of things can ever 
be remedied by the study and exegesis of Scripture argues 
a very sanguine state of mind. 

Indeed, it seems to the writer that Catholic theologians 
have every reason to be satisfied with the present state of the 
controversial situation, as it is set forth, for example, in Mr. 
Gladstone's Vaticanism and the replies to it, and may abide 
the issue with perfect complacency. Besides refusing to make 
use of the great weapon which science has put into its hands, 
Protestantism, in the very process of shifting the seat of 
authority from the Church to the Scriptures, had to rely upon 
the authority of the Church in receiving the books of the 
New Testament as authentic, and so involved itself in a radical 
inconsistency, which cripples it to this day in its conflict with 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 3 

Catholicism, and is amply sufficient to account for the counter- 
Reformation that began almost before Luther was in his grave. 
The progress of this reactionary movement has since then 
" slowed " considerably, but has never ceased to make headway, 
and may yet, not improbably, recover, as by a spring, the 
ground which it has lost. Many of us may scoff at the idea 
that, in an age of general and growing enlightenment, the 
Catholic Church can ever regain its power, resume its old 
intolerance, and once more become a danger to the State ; 
but even science itself is no safeguard against such a catas- 
trophe, until the community is converted by it to the anti- 
supernatural theory of the universe, and ceases to be overawed 
by the Church's claim to supernatural powers. 

It may be observed in general that, when a controversy is 
carried on for centuries on any subject of pressing and practical 
human interest, without reaching, or even tending to reach a 
consistent and satisfactory result — a result so commending 
itself to reason as to command universal assent — the reflection 
is obvious that the question or subject requires to be looked 
at from a point of view above that to which the disputants 
have been able to rise. And applying this observation to the 
matter in hand, the modern theologian hopes to obtain such a 
commanding view of the theological field by discarding en- 
tirely the miraculous element in the genesis and constitution of 
Christianity. But the Protestant Churches are as little disposed 
as the Catholic Church itself to follow him in this step. In his 
History oj England, Mr. J. R. Green hits the nail on the 
head when he says that " the real value to mankind of the 
religious revolution of the sixteenth century lay, not in the 
substitution of one creed for another," or, let us say, of one 
authority for another, " but in the new spirit of inquiry, the 
new freedom of thought and of discussion, which was awakened 
during the process of change." 

The Protestant Churches themselves never really broke away 
from authority, and never adopted what was really the only 
alternative principle — the principle of free and unfettered in- 
quiry. On the authority of Scripture, they adopted the super- 
natural theory of Christianity, though the Copernican system 
had already given a shock, felt by Melancthon, and no doubt 
by many others, to the supernatural idea generally. From 
that shock the supernatural idea has never recovered. Every 



14 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

advance in science since then has only added to its shattering 
force, though orthodox Protestantism to this day refuses to 
recognize the fact. 

Manifestly, the controversy hitherto waged between the 
Catholic and the Protestant Churches has been one not of 
principle, but of detail ; and the leaders, both of Catholic and 
of Protestant thought, are becoming more and more alive to 
the fact that that controversy is of less pressing and of less 
fundamental moment than another controversy to which they 
are challenged by a common enemy. Indications are not 
wanting of a disposition on the part of both Churches to unite 
their forces, and to occupy common ground against the assaults 
of scientific criticism upon historical Christianity. 

A watchful observer of the signs of the times (R. H. Hutton, 
in his Memoir of Cardinal Newman) has observed that 
" there is something like an entente cordiale between the Roman 
Catholic Church of to-day and the various other churches — an 
alliance against scepticism." It needs little discernment to 
perceive that the positions taken up, for example, by such 
representative men as Mr. St. George Mivart and Mr. Hutton 
himself, in regard to the place of Scripture in the Christian 
system, are all but identical. Scientific criticism has compelled 
the former to surrender the infallibility of the Scriptures, which 
the Catholic Church, under reservation of its own claim to the 
interpreting power, had declared to be canonical, or regulative 
of faith. Even with this reservation, he can no longer regard 
the Scriptures as infallible. It has become evident to him that 
there are statements — doctrinal and historical — in Scripture, 
which, by no license of interpretation, can be made to square 
with reason and fact. He has therefore, along with many of his 
co-religionists, and without expressed disapproval on the part of 
the heads of the Church, definitely abandoned the old position. 
According to the best knowledge of the present writer, Mr. 
Hutton's position is, that the Scriptures of the Old Testament 
are the " grand but not infallible literature of a divinely-in- 
structed people," and the Scriptures of the New Testament 
the literature of the early Christian Church under divine guid- 
ance. Both these representative men seem to unite in regarding 
the Church of the Old and of the New " dispensation " as the 
subject or depositary of special inspiration — a localizing of the 
supernatural influence so vague, so elastic, and protean, as to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 5 

be very serviceable indeed to the orthodox apologist, but 
not less obnoxious to modern thought than even the theory 
of the inspiration of the individual writers. Union is 
strength ; but it is not by the union of Catholic and Protes- 
tant on such terms that the cause of Christianity can be 
strengthened. 

In giving up to almost any extent the inspiration of Scripture 
the Roman Catholic Church really gives up nothing so long as 
it retains the doctrine of its own infallibility — the power of 
setting Scripture aside or ruling its interpretation. But the 
Protestant Church, in questioning ever so little the infallibility 
or special inspiration of Scripture, renounces, though it may be 
unconsciously, every authority in matters of religion, except 
that of the purified reason or religious instinct, and commits 
itself, by a great act of faith, to the divine principle in humanity 
as the supreme judge of Scripture and the guide into all truth. 
Between that authority and this there is no real standing ground 
in common. The mediating theory of an inspiration which is 
at once special and partial does not rescue the authority of 
Scripture. For on this theory the difficulty confessedly remains 
(Spectator, September 7, 1889) of "discriminating between the 
many various elements in Scripture and the proper amount of 
authority to be conceded to the different parts of it." This 
difficulty of discriminating in a partially inspired volume between 
what is and what is not inspired is a difficulty the same as that 
which exists in discriminating (on the supposition that no part 
of it is specially inspired) between what is true and what is not. 
If inspiration is partial, those portions only can be regarded as 
inspired which in one way or another we have first recognized 
to be true. The ability to discriminate between the various 
elements of Scripture requires that there be a principle which 
stands above Scripture. And where can that higher principle 
be seated but in the fallible reason of man, which is the testing 
instrument, the paramount authority. With every deduction 
which may thus be made from the authority of Scripture the 
writer believes, nevertheless, that it will ever remain for all 
civilized peoples " the book of religion," as Mr. Matthew Arnold 
regarded it, the literary deposit of the best that men have 
thought on the religious relation. It is a fact, apart from any 
theory as to inspiration, that when we search the Scriptures wc 
find in them much that stimulates our religious feelings and 



1 6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

appeals to our souls in proportion as we ourselves are imbued 
with the religious sentiment. 

Instead, therefore, of regarding Scripture as a specially in- 
spired volume, or as the literature of a divinely or specially 
guided nation or church, the writer regards it simply as the 
literature of a great religious movement, which culminated at 
two points, or rather ran through two stadia — the prophetic 
and the evangelic. The peculiarity of the former was that it 
was accompanied by a sense of incompleteness, and by an 
expectancy of further development. The latter was the long 
deferred, much desiderated, yet sudden consummation of the 
preceding — sudden inasmuch as it first declared itself in the 
consciousness of one man, who, by the heroism and power of 
his testimony to the truth revealed to his mind, stood so con- 
spicuous and alone, that when that exulting consciousness com- 
municated itself, through intercourse with him, to his disciples, 
they ascribed it to the occult and mysterious power of his work 
and person, and forthwith proclaimed him to be the author and 
bringer of salvation, entitled to divine honours. 

However willing, therefore, nay, anxious, to remain upon 
comparatively orthodox ground, the writer has never been able 
to reconcile himself to any of the so-called mediating schools 
of Protestant theology. These always appeared to him to have 
originated in the illogical and futile endeavour to effect a fusion 
of ideas which are mutually repellent and exclusive, but are 
made by mere trick and dexterity of language to pass and 
repass like dissolving views into each other in such a way as to 
mask their inherent antinomy. While the mediating schools of 
theology, as distinct from the liberal schools, seek to assert at 
any price the supernatural character of Christianity, and dread 
that the abandonment of that would deprive it of its divine 
sanction, the position taken up in this volume is that all truth 
has the divine sanction, and that we can still be Christians 
while denying that there is anything supernatural either in the 
origin or in the history of our religion. A talented theologian 
in this country of the mediating school (Dr. Bruce) in his book 
on The Miraculous Element of the Gospels has admitted that the 
" value of the healing works of Jesus, as media of revelation, 
apart from their value as evidences of the divine origin of 
revelation, does not at all depend upon their miraculousness." 
" Take these works," he goes on to say, " as media of revelation 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 7 

and you may learn much that is of vital importance to Christi- 
anity, and be, in important respects, a Christian in faith and 
practice, while your judgment is in suspense on the whole 
subject of miracles." The position of the present writer cannot 
be better defined than by saying that he accepts of this remark, 
but extends it to the life and teaching of Jesus as a whole. 
He holds the significance of that life as a medium of divine 
revelation to be independent of a miraculous element, and that 
the revelation thereby conveyed is its own evidence. 

To many it will seem to be unpardonable presumption on 
the part of any individual to assail a system of doctrine which 
has enjoyed the confidence of many generations, and furnished 
a stay to their spiritual life. But it is not so much the indi- 
vidual as modern thought and criticism which, through the 
individual, challenges the system. The writer's acquaintance 
with these, such as it is, has satisfied him that Christianity can 
no longer be safely left to rest upon the basis or hypothesis of 
the supernatural, and that its traditional or orthodox form is 
vitiated by the miraculous element which is essential to it in 
that form. The cause of Christianity, which he regards as the 
cause of religion, has already suffered much from being identified 
or made to stand or fall with a hypothesis which is no longer 
tenable. And with this conviction impressed on his mind, he 
undertakes to show that the genesis of Christianity may, like 
that of any other process, be explained on natural principles. 

At this day there are, it is notorious, great multitudes of 
thoughtful Christians, who feel that their spiritual life has a 
sufficient stay in the simple, undogmatic teaching of Jesus, 
which is the common base of all the creeds ; but who, finding 
no help in the Pauline or orthodox dogma, do not trouble or 
concern themselves with it. Few, however, of those who are in 
this state of mind, are aware how much is involved in their 
position when consistently carried out — what a revolution it 
implies in the whole current of theological thought, or by what 
process of reasoning it may be, or needs to be, justified. For 
such persons we shall endeavour to make these points clear, 
and to show that the dogma which has no interest for them, is 
yet the form which the Christian idea has assumed in order 
the better to sway the will, to touch the feeling, to adapt itself 
to the intelligence of the general mind. 

If in the following pages a thought should here and there be 

B 



I 8 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

repeated, let it be borne in mind that, in the course of the long 
secular development here to be traced, the same springs and 
principles of action may be expected to come into play at 
various points, and may require to be noted on each occasion ; 
that it may not be possible to dispose of a subject once for all 
when it first presents itself for consideration, and that the same 
remark or criticism occurring in a different connection need not 
be a mere repetition. Further, it will appear that there are 
several decisive moments or stadia in the grand religious de- 
velopment which ended in orthodox Christianity, and that the 
writer has felt it necessary to devote to these an amount of 
attention which, to the hasty judgment, may seem excessive, 
but will, perhaps, be found on a closer acquaintance to be not 
more than proportioned to their importance. He also trusts 
that his wish to avoid circumlocution will be accepted as his 
apology for his occasional, or, what may seem to be, his too 
frequent employment of technical theological terms. 



CHAPTER II. 

THEORY OF ANTI-SUPERNATURALISM. 

LIKE other forms of positive religion, Christianity became 
a subject of history proper only when it began to take effect 
upon masses of men and to be an appreciable factor in their 
social condition. It had what may be called a prehistoric 
period, of which the memory or record was necessarily mythical, 
because the psychological laws which were in operation in 
its genesis were not understood, were not even thought of, 
by those who were the witnesses or reporters of its origin. 
With the few facts, which tradition or legend had preserved, 
the mythicizing fancy interwove supernatural elements to 
account for its genesis, and to bring it to that point at which 
it incorporated itself in forms of worship and of dogma, in 
institutions and in communities of adherents, and so entered as 
a visible factor into the stream of history. This mythical or 
prehistoric period was the period, first of its inception and 
genesis in the brooding, meditative mind of Jesus, and, next 
of its propagation to the minds of his personal followers and 
their more immediate converts : and this is the period with 
which we purpose chiefly to deal. The meaning and the 
truth of this preliminary statement and of others like it will 
appear gradually as we proceed in our discussion. 

In few words, let it here be said summarily that the nega- 
tive or " destructive " criticism which we propose to direct 
against orthodox Christianity, is based on the anti-supernatural 
view of the divine government, and that our positive but 
undogmatic construction of Christianity is based on the 
teaching of Jesus. In this section, we shall seek to define 
and to defend the anti-supernatural view, and to draw the 



20 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

inferences in regard to dogma which seem to flow from it. 
In several of the following sections we shall seek to show 
that the doctrine of Jesus is the doctrine of the absolute 
religion, or of that form of religion which answers to the 
religious idea ; and, also, that the path by which Jesus was 
led to his great discovery was by the way of historical 
development. In the remaining sections, we shall endeavour 
to trace the steps by which the dogma in its canonical form 
grew up out of the doctrine and the life of Jesus. The way 
is long and difficult : many of the steps are more or less 
conjectural : and some of the details may be doubtful and 
open to dispute, as of matters upon which the last word has 
not been spoken. But it is because, in spite of all such con- 
siderations, we have confidence in our general view, that we 
now venture to ask the attention of the public. 

As we purpose to trace, step by step, the natural genesis 
of Christianity, that is, to show that it can be explained by 
natural causes, we must, at the outset, endeavour to point 
out our justification for an undertaking of this kind : a part 
of our task which will detain us for some time, but which, 
being necessary for the completeness of the discussion, cannot 
be altogether omitted or even summarily disposed of. Be- 
speaking, therefore, the reader's patience, we proceed to say, 
that this undertaking seems to us to be called for, because, 
with a large and ever increasing number of cultivated men, 
we hold that miracles not only " do not," but cannot happen. 
Not, we wish it to be observed, that we reached our view 
of the religious relation, or, let us rather say, of the nature 
of Christianity, by taking this as our starting point. For 
the genetic order of our thought 'was exactly the reverse, 
inasmuch as our view of that relation forced itself inde- 
pendently upon our conviction, and led us on to the position 
that miracle is impossible. But, without dwelling on this 
point, we confess that, as here stated in synthetic form, this 
assumption has all the appearance of an unwarranted begging 
of the whole question in dispute, and a summary setting aside 
of the claims of Christianity to be a supernatural revelation. 
This has been so strongly felt that, in order to avoid the 
appearance of a petitio principii, many even of those critics 
who deny the supernatural nature of Christianity, set out by 
admitting the possibility of miracle in the abstract, while 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2 1 

maintaining that the alleged miracles of Christianity do not 
satisfy their canons- of credibility. And no doubt this inter- 
mediate position has a certain air of judicial candour and 
of dispassionate consideration. But it cannot be concealed 
that this mode of treatment opens the door to endless con- 
troversy and gives no hope of a conclusive settlement. Just 
as in the interpretation of Scripture the acceptance of the 
miraculous element opens the door to discussions which lead 
to no result, so, in weighing the evidences of Christianity, 
to admit the possibility of miracle involves us in endless 
controversy and difference of opinion. 

It is impossible to determine the amount of evidence which 
is necessary to prove the reality of an alleged miracle, or to say 
when it is that the presumption against such an abnormal 
occurrence is overcome. Minds of one class, especially those 
who have undergone a training in science, will demand an 
amount and species of evidence which, in the circumstances, 
is quite unattainable and out of the question. Another class of 
minds, especially those in whom the religious instinct has been 
strongly cultivated, will be only too easily satisfied as to the 
miraculous nature of Christianity, or indeed of any religious 
system in which they have been educated. To the latter it 
will always seem as if what is possible will, under certain 
conditions, and in emergencies of presumably supreme and 
universal gravity, be actualized ; they will be ready to give the 
benefit of a presumption in favour of the Gospel miracles, and 
to accept evidence for them which is not much stronger than 
that which suffices to establish the occurrence of any not very 
common, but admittedly possible event — e.g.> to accept the 
narrative of the resurrection of Jesus almost as readily as that 
of his crucifixion. For such persons, indeed, the reality of the 
supernatural element in Christianity — the very thing which 
remains to be proved — may seem to be so probable in itself as 
to stand in need of little other proof. And when this broad 
ground is taken up, that element will come in everywhere to 
help -the solution of the historical difficulty, to explain away 
every discrepancy in the records. With a little mystery here, 
and a little mystery there, every test of credibility will be satis- 
fied, and the whole system will present itself to their minds 
with a fair show and a firm front ; the weaker or missing links 
in the chain of evidence will be regarded as mere tests of faith ; 



2 2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and to make light of fundamental, no less than of superficial 
difficulties, will be regarded as a proof of the presence in their 
minds of a faculty of spiritual discernment, or of a faith that is 
above reason. The supernatural element may, in fact, be com- 
pared to the grain of chaff" which, according to the nursery tale, 
was demanded by the magician that he might give to the rope 
of sand the tenacity of a hempen cable. 

In his Grammar of Assent and elsewhere, Cardinal New- 
man endeavours to show the rationale of such an attitude of 
mind towards the Gospel miracles. He dwells upon the mys- 
tery which envelops all human affairs, but especially in the 
religious sphere ; upon the weakness and perversity of the 
human intellect ; its proneness to be led astray by false lights ; 
its inability to discriminate between the true and the false, and 
its irrepressible longing to attain to some certain knowledge of 
God. From these and other such considerations, he infers the 
high probability that God will condescend to grant some direct 
and unmistakable revelation of absolute truth to mankind. 
And in the case of a religion calculated, like the Christian, to 
satisfy these longings, he further infers that, in order to convert 
the probability into certainty, and to establish the fact of its 
supernatural character, such an antecedent presumption needs 
only to be supplemented by some very slender extrinsic 
evidence — by an evidence which, apart from the intrinsic pro- 
bability, would by no means satisfy the reason. 

This may be taken as a rough description from memory 
of Newman's views on this subject. What gives importance 
to these is, that they represent the views which are implicitly 
held by multitudes, and which enable them to put aside the 
scientific and critical objections to the credibility of the Gospel 
miracles. Indeed, it is easy to see that to grant the possibility 
of miracle in the abstract, is to surrender the whole position to 
the orthodox theologian. To say the very least, it is to place 
the supernatural character of Christianity among the things 
which cannot be disproved, and to throw the door open to a 
never-ending because resultless controversy between the scien- 
tific and the religious spirit. For, as there is no prospect or 
likelihood of the scientific spirit abandoning its position, the 
controversy will come to an end, if it ever does, only when 
the religious spirit learns to accommodate itself to the scientific 
theory of the universe. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 23 

Nothing more need be said to demonstrate what an incon- 
clusive procedure it is to rest the denial of the miraculous 
element of the Gospels, as Kiienen in Holland and Huxley in 
this country are disposed to do, on the inadequacy of the 
historical evidence. When a critic like Kiienen professes to 
believe, or not to dispute, the possibility of miracle in the 
abstract, and to be willing to leave that as an open and 
unsettled question, but at the same time shows himself very 
exacting as to the evidence for the miraculous element in 
Christianity as a whole, or for the miraculous works recorded 
of Jesus in particular, and declares that the evidence for these 
does not satisfy his canons of credibility, the likelihood is that, 
unconsciously to himself, there is an arriere pensee in his mind 
equivalent to the denial of the possibility of miracles ; at least, 
that is the impression which the rigour of his criticism will 
make on the minds of others. 

Professor Huxley takes up much the same ground as Pro- 
fessor Kiienen, and tells us that " No one is entitled to say 
a priori that any given so-called miraculous event is impossible," 
and that " Objections to the occurrence of miracles cannot be 
scientifically based on any a priori considerations." But to 
these propositions it may be replied, that the considerations to 
which he refers are not a priori, at least not in the sense of 
being metaphysical ; though, even if they were, they might yet 
be relevant ; neither are they a priori in the sense of being 
" unvermittelt," or independent of all previous knowledge or 
experience. Science itself has brought into view certain con- 
siderations which strongly imply the impossibility of any in- 
fraction of the immanent laws of existence — considerations 
which but for science would never have been heard of. Science 
has pushed its investigations into almost every department of 
existence, and in every one, physical and psychological, to 
which it has gained access, it has found that all occurrences, 
phenomena, and sequences bear invariable witness to the con- 
trol of law and to the sway of order — that what is called 
divine action never operates irrespective of such order, or other- 
wise than naturally — z>., through, or in accordance with such 
order. 

The inference is irresistible that the same thing holds true in 
those departments also, if such there be, which science has not 
yet invaded, and the tendency is fostered in the scientific mind 



24 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

to assume that every fact or event, however strange, and appar- 
ent!)' exceptional or abnormal, admits of being subsumed under 
some general law or laws, either already ascertained or yet 
ascertainable. Of course, Professor Huxley admits this to the 
fullest extent. He says, " When repeated and minute examina- 
tion (i.e., science) never reveals a break in the chain of causes 
and effects, the belief that that chain never has been broken, 
and never will be broken, becomes one of the strongest and 
most justifiable of human convictions." This, in other words, 
is the belief in the universal reign of law ; or, which is the same 
thing, the belief that occurrences really abnormal or miraculous 
are excluded by a supreme necessity. But when this man of 
science defines nature as " the totality of all events, past, 
present, and to come," it seems to us that he really and unwar- 
rantably seeks to beg the whole question as regards the so-called 
miracles of the New Testament, and contributes nothing what- 
ever to its settlement. The definition may be, and, we believe, 
is in itself perfectly just. But then the very idea of miracle, as 
exemplified in the New Testament, and as evidential of the 
divine revelation, of which the Scripture professes to be the 
record, is that of an event or phenomenon, conceived of as 
outside the course of nature, and caused by the direct action 
of the power which is above nature. And the definition, by 
excluding the occurrence of such an event, involves an "a priori 
consideration," quite as much as the proposition that miracles 
are impossible, and indeed, as applied to the Scriptural narratives, 
is identical with it. In passing, it may be noticed that the 
ground occupied by Professor Huxley, though allied to that 
occupied by Professor Ktienen, is yet not quite the same. For 
if the latter were satisfied with the evidence of any " so-called " 
miracle, such as the resurrection of Jesus, he would accept of it 
as an actual miracle or direct act of God ; whereas if Professor 
Huxley were satisfied with the evidence, he would still refuse to 
admit the miraculous character of the event, and rank it among 
natural phenomena. 

Modern thought holds, in the form of a scientific conviction, 
what was matter of surmise or divination to a few of the leading 
minds in ages long past, viz., that the universe is governed by 
immutable laws inherent in the very nature and constitution of 
things — by laws which are " never reversed, never suspended, 
and never supplemented in the interest of any special object 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 25 

whatever." It holds that there exists a key to all phenomena 
both of mind and matter in laws of which some are hidden from 
us and remain to be ascertained. The key may not be com- 
plete in the sense of clearing up the mystery of existence ; but 
it is the key to all the knowledge which we shall ever acquire 
respecting that mystery. 

It has been generally held that this view of the universal 
reign of law is fatal to any belief in the supernatural character 
of Christianity or of the alleged miracles of Scripture. But 
there is another view of this subject which seeks to evade this 
conclusion. This other view has been ably expounded by the 
Duke of Argyll in his widely read and classical treatise on the 
subject, and to his exposition the reader's attention may now be 
directed. The position or hypothesis from which he starts is, 
that the reign of law is universal, and that there can be no such 
thing as a violation or suspension of law. He believes that the 
so-called miracles of the New Testament were actual occurrences ; 
but he does not admit that they were at variance with natural 
law. They were wrought by the divine power acting in accord- 
ance with laws, some of which are beyond our knowledge or 
beyond our reach ; a view of them to which he thinks that 
science itself can have no objections ; a sense in which " no man 
can have any difficulty in believing " in their supernatural 
character. " Ordinarily God governs it (the world) by the 
choice and use of means. . . . Extraordinary manifestations 
of His will — signs and wonders — may be wrought, for aught we 
know, by similar instrumentality — only by the selection and use 
of laws of which man knows and can know nothing, and which, 
if he did know, he could not employ." As man accomplishes 
his purposes by the selection and employment of the laws with 
which he is acquainted, the question is asked, " Is it difficult to 
believe that after the same manner also the divine will, of which 
ours is the image only, works and effects its purposes ? " 

Now, upon all such reasoning we remark, (1.) That it seems 
to be much of the nature of an argumentum ad ignorantiam. 
It amounts in effect to this, that though we do not know the 
laws or the means by which the miracles recorded in Scripture 
could be accomplished, yet, for aught we can tell, there may be 
" some law " or laws, known to God, equal to their production. 

(2.) The reasoning may seem to suggest a possible explana- 
tion of some of the minor and evidential miracles of the New 



2 6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Testament, and of some remarkable departures from the 
ordinary course or concatenations of such, which we sometimes 
speak of as special providences — by two of which the Duke 
illustrates his meaning, viz., the marvellous preservation of the 
Jews as a distinct people, and the rapid propagation of Chris- 
tianity ; but when this reasoning is made use of to explain the 
central and constituent facts of orthodox Christianity — such as 
the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus — it fails altogether 
to diminish the difficulty which men have in believing such 
events, and for this simple reason, that the means by which 
such prodigies could be brought to pass are as difficult of com- 
prehension as are the events themselves, when viewed as brought 
about independently of the use of means, and by the mere 
exercise of the divine will. 

(3.) The reasoning is in flat contradiction to the tenor of all 
Scripture, which everywhere implies that the miracles were 
creative acts. As God said in the beginning, " Let there be 
light, and light was," so Jesus at the grave in Bethany said, 
" Lazarus, come forth ! and he that was dead came forth." Of 
means there is no mention, or rather they are excluded. Jesus 
speaks and it is done. His word of command gives voice to the 
exercise of his will. Beyond or besides that there is nothing more. 

(4.) The analogy between human and divine agency, on which 
the Duke of Argyll insists, is very misleading and limping. 
The human agent, with all his faculties of invention and con- 
trivance, belongs to and is part of the system of nature ; but 
the divine agent belongs to that system only in so far as he is 
immanent in the laws ; and as no power of self-arrangement or 
of self-adaptation to any special purpose is found to reside in 
these laws, they do not and cannot lend themselves to any such 
arrangement or adaptation on the part of the immanent power. 
And, on the other hand, if God be conceived as transcendent, 
His action in selecting and making use of laws for a special 
purpose is supernatural, just because, so conceived of, He is not 
in that system, but apart from and above it. So far as He is 
supposed to guide and control " the mutual action and reaction 
of the laws among each other," He does so from without the 
chain of natural sequence — i.e., in a strictly supernatural manner. 
The clear conclusion therefore is, that divine action, however 
conceived, bears no analogy, except of the most general kind, 
to the action of man in " varying the results of natural law." 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2 J 

The hypothesis of such analogy stands or falls with a theory of 
the divine government of the world, which ontologically is very 
disputable — with the theory, viz., which represents God as 
selecting, combining, and, so to speak, manipulating laws that 
are the expression of His own will, and of which some are and 
some are not accessible to human knowledge. By this process 
God is supposed to effect purposes which these laws of them- 
selves, without extraneous direction and control, could not 
effect — a position which to us appears to be quite untenable. 

Finally, the proposition that unknown or unknowable laws 
may, by the power supreme, be brought into play in human 
affairs so as to effect extraordinary or unaccountable results 
such as those of which the Duke cites examples, is very 
doubtful or rather unthinkable. It is by the knowledge, 
explicit or implicit, of law that rational beings are enabled 
to direct their course in life ; and, therefore, so far as the 
guidance of conduct (or may we not say religion) is con- 
cerned, an unknown law is as good as no law, or can only 
operate mechanically so as to reduce men to the condition 
of puppets. 

The Duke's theory seems to come near to that of Arch- 
deacon Wilson {Essays and Addresses, p. 1 15), and of 
others, who assume that the affairs of man are " at once 
under the guiding control of Providence, as well as subject 
to uniform laws," and that the divine government may be 
" providential without being miraculous." In contradistinction 
to this doctrine our position is, that providence occupies no 
middle ground between the purely natural and the miracu- 
lous ; that God's control over human affairs is exercised 
solely through law ; and that law itself acknowledges no 
control. The uniform operation of law is the condition under 
which the human race, individually and collectively, works 
out its destiny and fulfils the divine purpose. Evidences 
for the occasional manifestation of laws that are not in 
constant operation exist only for the devout imagination. 
We use, no doubt, a true and a beautiful expression when 
we speak of God's " perfect providence." But its perfection 
consists solely in the unerring certainty with which law, 
moral and physical, takes effect. A bound is thus set to the 
errancy of the rational and reflecting subject ; a powerful 
motive is supplied to a life of conformity with law, and a 



2 8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

corrective influence is seen to act constantly upon human 
conduct, so as " to bring good out of evil, and render those 
who think only of their own passions and purposes, executors 
of the will of heaven." Neither with nor without disguise, 
neither secretly nor openly can providence encroach on 
human liberty. To be consistent with its own action in 
endowing man with a will of his own, it must leave room 
for the exercise of freedom and permit of an element of 
imperfection and of evil, of negation and perversion in all 
human affairs. 

To represent, as we are here doing, the sphere of provi- 
dence as confined within definite and immovable limits has 
been characterized as " senseless cruelty " towards the large 
masses of religious men, who find comfort in the thought of 
providence as something over and above the reign of law, 
or as a vague and unrepresentable selection and marshalling 
of laws known and unknown, by a power which is above 
law and called into action by the prayer of faith. But 
the cruelty (which is only apparent) lies in the fact that 
the divine law executes itself in complete disregard of 
human misapprehension and perversity, and thus occasions 
a cruel disappointment to the wilful or illusory expectations 
of men. Instead of humouring their wilfulness or their 
illusions, it holds on in its undeviating course till it effects 
their disillusionment and enforces compliance. And so 
it is that when evil men in ignorance or forgetfulness of 
the law of retribution hope to escape the consequences of 
their deed, they cannot fail to be cruelly disappointed. And 
even pious men when they expect by means of faith and 
prayer to extort extraneous aid directly from above, must 
also be disappointed when they find that the expected aid 
does not fall responsive. 

But there is no cruelty chargeable against those religious 
teachers who point out the true method of the divine govern- 
ment according to which God never departs from His laws, 
so that he who sets himself in opposition is crushed by their 
weight, Matth. xxi. 44 ; whereas, he who conforms to their 
requirements discovers in them the soul and purpose of 
divine goodness, Ps. xxxi. 19. The limitation of providence 
which we here allege is the explanation of the slow advance 
of humanity, and of the many puzzling questions which crowd 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 29 

upon the man who attempts to trace the progress of the 
race through the intricacies of its history ; through the 
forward and backward movements of its civilization. From 
what has just been said of providence, our views of the 
nature of prayer may be inferred. Without anticipating 
what may yet be said on this subject, we content ourselves 
with stating here, that according to our general view 
prayer is the act by which we surrender ourselves to the 
will and enter into the idea of God propounded by Jesus, 
and verifiable, as will yet be shown, in the experience of 
his disciples. 

From the orthodox point of view on which the Duke of 
Argyll somewhat doubtfully takes his stand, Christianity is 
regarded as a revealed system in the making or unfolding of 
which natural and supernatural elements are combined in 
certain indeterminable proportions ; a great historical develop- 
ment, of which events or facts, not miraculous in themselves, 
it may be, but requiring the intervention of a miraculous hand, 
form a large part. But can that be called a development in 
which such elements are incorporated and are necessary for 
carrying it on ? All true development comes from within : 
it is the unfolding of a germ, it is rooted in the past. A 
process or evolution which depends on extraneous agency is 
mechanical, not organic, and just by the interference of 
supernatural agency ceases to be in any proper sense a divine 
work. For it represents God as adopting a finite manner of 
working ; as acting the part of a joiner or carpenter, mortising 
and dovetailing one piece with another, or of a chemist who by 
scientific and artificial processes is able to form compounds 
which are nowhere to be met with in the realms of nature. 
The religious instinct, the germ of which Christianity is the 
long deferred but ripest fruit — required, no doubt, like other 
germs, certain favourable conditions for its development ; but 
these conditions were given in the operation of natural laws, 
and in the universal frame of things, of which the germ itself 
is part : so that any force or action extraneous to that is out 
of the question. If it be said that the elements of human 
nature and the conditions under which they operate are not 
sufficient to account for Christianity, and that something more 
was necessary, this is what we refuse to believe. It is true 
that the Christian dogma implies the supernatural. But the 



30 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 



question arises whether the dogma is essential to Christianity ; 
may the dogma not be an excrescence? May Christianity 
not have a power independent of dogma : may not the power 
which it seems to derive from the dogma be unreal and illusory, 
and more than balanced by compensating weakness? May 
not the truth which lies at the heart of Christianity be 
altogether in the doctrine of Jesus, from which the dogmatic 
element, as will be shown, is wholly absent? What we 
purpose to prove is, that the supernatural element did not 
enter into the development, but that the faith in that element 
grew up side by side with the development as its explanation 
and was introduced into the record of it. 

To the above view or theory of the relation in which God 
stands to the universe, may be opposed another view of it, 
which to us seems to be more legitimate and more in accord- 
ance with empirical and scientific observation. Of this other 
view, if we may claim nothing more for it, this at least may 
be said, that it is not more idle or fanciful than the preceding. 
And though it will necessitate a short digression, we shall 
here state briefly what it is. According to this view, the divine 
causality is absolute in the sense of its being immanent and 
all pervasive in the universe. Divine action is not trans- 
cendent so as to admit of the selection and manipulation of 
laws ; but it is absolute both in its scope and character ; 
immutable, irresistible, and invariable. A casual, precarious, 
finite, variable, and contingent element enters the universe 
only with the appearance upon the scene of man, the rational 
and reflective creature, whose action is yet limited and con- 
ditioned by the absolute ground of itself, and of all besides. 
Man it is, to whom it is given to make a selection of instru- 
ments, and to discover and draw forth by selection and 
combination all the hidden possibilities and properties of the 
elements, physical and spiritual, of nature ; and in his character 
of finite factor, to act as the deputy and lieutenant, the 
minister and interpreter of the Great First Cause. The pure 
outcome of the absolute causality of God, unvaried by finite 
action from without, is the earth with the vegetable and animal 
kingdom, and at the head and summit of it, man himself in 
his natural condition, carrying within him the germ and pro- 
mise of the future. Whatever raises the earth above its 
natural or prairie value is due to human action, which clothes 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 I 

the earth with new beauty and covers it with monuments of 
adaptive skill. And so too, whatever exalts and elevates 
man himself above his natural state, which is only a little 
higher than that of the brutes, is also due to the exercise of 
his finite intelligence, conditioned and limited by that same 
absolute ground. His morality, his civilization, and his religion 
are self-developments of that divine germ within him, which 
is the highest product of the purely absolute action of God ; 
and contains within it the possibility of all that is higher in 
humanity and of its approximation to its divine source. A 
position in the universe is thus assigned to man, second only 
to that of God Himself, whose fellow-worker he is ; a position 
not accidental, but indispensable, and essential to the accom- 
plishment and perfecting of the divine purpose. 

It is through the instrumentality of this His progressive 
creature, man, that the work by which God manifests His 
otherwise unutterable thought is still in process. And in 
every event of human history, there is thus at once an 
element of divine necessity and of human finitude, by which 
latter is meant that variableness of man's action which re- 
sults from his imperfect intelligence, and the relative or 
restricted freedom of his will. It is by both of those ele- 
ments, indissolubly combined, that the divine purpose in 
creation, which is a postulate of human thought, is worked 
out. And this combination, be it observed, belongs to the 
natural, not to the supernatural order of the universe. Or 
if we prefer to have it so, let it be said that the order of 
the universe is the natural supernatural, by which is meant, 
that the divine or supernatural element is never and nowhere 
absent, but also not more present in the spiritual than in 
the physical life, in the religious than in the secular and 
political sphere of human history. And be it further observed, 
that this theory of the universe for which we have now pleaded 
on comparatively abstract grounds, is also that one of the 
two which answers best to the great outstanding facts of 
human experience. 

Humanity is manifestly endowed with certain capacities, 
and placed in a vast and intricate universe, so as to be ex- 
posed to endless contingencies or vicissitudes of good and 
evil ; and according to this theory, it is in the play and 
interplay of these capacities and of these contingencies that 



32 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the course of human history and the lives of individuals 
arc determined. We may think or believe that providence 
plays a part in the affairs of men over and above that of 
the action of law in redressing the evils of existence, and 
in swaying the course of history to a better direction than 
it would otherwise take. But it is hard, or rather impossible 
to verify this belief. Ever and again we are forced to admit 
that the ways of providence are mysterious, an admission 
that there are facts and events which do not bear out this 
belief, but rather seem to run counter to it, a phrase by 
which we seek to set aside the logic of such facts, and to 
throw a veil over the unverifiable nature of the supernatural 
theory. 

In dealing then with the claim of Christianity to be a 
supernatural system, we prefer to keep to the popular, Scrip- 
tural, and unevasive definition of the miracle, as a suspen- 
sion of the laws of nature, or, better still, as an autocratic 
act of divine power, regardless of these laws, and independent 
of the use of means. Of any alleged event of this kind we 
deny the possibility. We hold that God governs the universe 
by immutable laws, and that He neither does nor can act 
except through such laws ; for they are laws which obviously 
do not imply a power of self-arrangement for any special 
purpose, and therefore do not lend themselves to any arrange- 
ment, such as seems to be required by the supernatural theory, 
on the part of the absolute power of God, which is immanent 
in them. Clearly the prerogative which the Duke of Argyll 
claims for God, of selecting the law by which He effects His 
purposes, is a prerogative which He can exercise not through 
the system of law itself, but only from outside or from above 
the law, and independently of it. 

To enter fully into a defence of this position would be 
out of place here. But we may briefly dispose of two objec- 
tions, which, if we may judge from the reliance placed upon 
them by recent distinguished apologists, must appeal powerfully 
to the popular theological feeling in this country. The first 
of these is, that this modern view of the divine government 
involves a denial of divine freedom, that it restricts and limits 
God's action, or, as it has been expressed, " makes the world 
His prison." It has been urged that we cannot deny to God 
that liberty of action which we ourselves enjoy. Can He, it 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 33 

has been asked, who has endowed His creature, man, with 
this gift, not Himself be possessed of it ? It is forgotten, 
that while, in a comparison between man and the inferior 
creatures, the gift of freedom, or the power of choosing be- 
tween two or more competing courses, is a prerogative of the 
higher nature of the human race, it may, in comparing the 
race with the creator, be a mark and badge of its imperfection 
and finitude. While the very most that can be predicated 
of man is the posse non errare, the non posse errare is the 
predicate of God. The great order which He has established, 
He has established once for all ; an order so perfect that even 
He cannot alter or deviate from it without confessing to the 
posse errare. Indeed the objection, which we have been con- 
sidering, is founded on an entirely sensuous and empirical 
conception of the relation in which God stands to the universe, 
and it is seen fairly to break down when we keep before us 
the true or scientific view of that relation, which is, that the 
universe, or the laws which obtain in it, express fully and ab- 
solutely the mind of God, and therefore admit of no exception. 
To say with an eminent living theologian (Fairbairn, Studies, 
p. 3), that "the universe is but a poor and inadequate expression 
of the divine thought," is a wholly misleading idea, and in- 
volves a thoroughly anthropomorphic conception of God. Con- 
fessedly, a man's work, aesthetic or moral, always and of 
necessity falls short of his ideal ; but to transfer this shortcoming 
to the work of God, is the very essence or principle of anthro- 
pomorphism. What should be said is, that the law which 
obtains in the universe is the perfect and adequate transcript 
of the divine will, the perfect reflection or manifestation of 
the divine nature, the necessary and therefore invariable rule 
or mode of divine action. The true philosophic position is 
neither that of the optimist, who says that this is the best 
possible world ; nor that of the pessimist, who says that it 
is the worst possible ; but that it is the only possible world. 

That human action, while modifying and to some extent 
controlling the course of events, is yet limited by the divine 
law is certain, but in no sense can God be said to be limited 
by a law which is the exact expression of His will. While 
acting in invariable accordance with that law God exercises 
the most absolute liberty, and it is not conceivable that He 
should act otherwise. The solitary apparent exception to 

c 



34 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

these propositions, on which so much theology has been made 
to turn, is only apparent. Divine liberty is not limited by 
human perversity. The goodness and perfectness of God's crea- 
ture, man, consists in the possibilities of good in his nature. 
These possibilities may not be realized: they even involve the 
possibility of evil. But in any case, the law under which 
man is placed, and for which God is responsible, is good in the 
sense that it " makes for righteousness " and for the general 
welfare, and that sooner or later it will work itself out. 

There is yet another objection to the view of the divine 
government here advocated, which has some claim to scientific 
value, and which, if we may judge from the reliance placed upon 
it by apologetic theologians, must, as already said, appeal power- 
fully to popular theological feeling. This objection is founded 
on the hypothesis that there must have been certain points in 
kosmical evolution at which the resources of creative energy 
were called into play ; such, for example, as the formation of 
the world, the dawn of life, of consciousness, and of reason or 
conscience. The hypothesis is, that by no stretch of the evolu- 
tionary principle can we hope to account for the superinduction 
of organic existence upon the inorganic, or for the awakening of 
consciousness in the unconscious forms of existence. The 
elevation of existence at these and other points to a higher level 
can, it is said, be explained only by the influx of miraculous or 
creative energy ; and therefore there are occasions or conditions 
under which God may interfere by direct action in the process 
of evolution, in order to produce results which could not be 
produced by the medium of natural causality. And just such 
an occasion may have been the introduction of Christianity, in 
the discussion of which, therefore, we are not entitled to deny 
the possible presence of a miraculous element. 

To admit the premiss in this reasoning is to abandon the 
anti-supernatural position, which, therefore, it is necessary to 
state here in few words conveniently placed to our hands. 
(Compare Dr. van Bell, Tijdschrift, 1888, p. 135.) The anti- 
supernaturalist denies in toto any such thing as a transcendent 
activity of the divine power ; and while he maintains that the 
divine action is wholly immanent in the things themselves, he 
also denies the possibility of any immanent activity outside of, 
apart from, or supplementary to that aboriginal, omnipresent, 
and ever-working immanence which takes shape and form in the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 5 

nature, purpose, and constitution of the universe. When lan- 
guage, which implies the contrary, is employed, it is not scien- 
tific, but popular, and presents the action of God, not as it is in 
itself, but in a form which is symbolically approximate, and is 
also justifiable in so far as it may be helpful to the infirmity of 
human intelligence, and adapted to a state of intellectual pupil- 
age. But the religious man who aims at scientific truth of 
conception is one who cultivates the thought that God, who is 
infinitely far off, is at the same time mysteriously nigh in the 
inmost depths of the human soul. Here, indeed, for him is the 
grand antinomy of thought which faith has now, more than ever, 
to resolve. The divine principle is the base and ground of all 
existence, and, in the unity and immanence of its action, is 
adequate to the production both of mind and matter, and of all 
the forms they assume, and of all the changes they undergo. 
Corresponding with this oneness of divine action is that oneness 
of mystery which envelops all existence. In no case, however 
common and familiar, and therefore, as many think, intelligible, 
can we penetrate the mystery of causation or of sequence any 
more than we can understand the origin of matter or the dawn 
of life. And at no point is it permissible to call in the idea of 
an exceptional exertion of divine power, whether immanent or 
transcendent, supplementary to that which is eternally operative. 
It may be long before the theological mind becomes familiarised 
with this scientific, anti-supernaturalistic conception of the divine 
relation to the universe. But until this conception is embraced, 
theology will remain, as it now is, in a deadlock, with no 
possibility of advance in any direction whatever. 

That now given is the definitive, uncompromising, and for 
ourselves satisfactory reply to the advocates of miracle in all its 
forms. Still there are those who, while satisfied with the 
doctrine of natural and orderly evolution as a general principle, 
yet, as we have seen, postulate the presence of a supernatural 
factor at certain points in the great evolutionary procession. 
For the sake of such persons, of whom there are many, we may 
for a moment quit our uncompromising position, in order to 
point out to them that, even if their postulate be granted, it does 
not bring them much nearer to the conclusion that a like 
supplemental factor is required to account for the origin of 
Christianity. For it is at least conceivable that the action of 
immediate divine causality might be admissible in those other 



3 6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

cases, but not in this latter. To take but one example, it might 
be said, from this lower point of view, that the awakening of 
conscious intelligence was a postulate of law itself, absolutely 
indispensable to the constitution of the kosmos, necessary for 
the manifestation of that infinite power which is the underlying 
ground of all phenomena, and whose resources were not 
exhausted by the appearance of inorganic nature or mere 
animal life. It is conceivable that the impulse of the eternal 
ground of existence to unfold, to utter, and manifest itself, may 
have evoked the exercise of a creative power to furnish the 
world with rational beings as the media and instruments of a 
more adequate and perfect manifestation of itself. But for such 
beings the world would have fallen short of that perfection 
which we ascribe to all God's works as the mirror of Himself, 
and would, to the eye of the Eternal, have presented an incom- 
pleteness like that of the truncated cone, or, rather let us say, 
of a stage on which the actors never appeared. Many of its 
hidden forces would never have come into play, its beauty 
would have been wasted for want of the seeing eye, its 
resources never unfolded, its capabilities undeveloped for 
want of the cunning hand, the combining intellect, and the 
inventive imagination of the rational finite being. It is con- 
ceivable, therefore, that an exercise of immediate causation 
on the part of God might be admissible at this point ; but 
that anything of the kind might cease to be admissible 
when the world was furnished in all its parts, when the 
higher stage was laid, when all the actors were in their 
places endowed with specific capacities of action and develop- 
ment, and when all nature, including human nature, was set 
forward in its course. The whole body of law, which lay 
ideally in the divine mind, might then come into full operation, 
and no conceivable motive or necessity could then remain for 
further interference on the part of God ; unless we regard as 
such the orderly action of laws in which His power and will are 
immanent — of laws which are immanent in the world and 
represent His presence there. Even, therefore, if we admit the 
operation of a creative energy — the incursion of a miraculous 
element in the origin of the human species, we need not admit 
the possibility of the same in the genesis of Christianity or in 
aid of the development of that religious principle which is 
inherent in human nature and part of its original equipment. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. S7 

For we may remind the reader that the object of Christianity, 
as of all religion, is to raise humanity towards its ideal state, 
but that that state is determined and fixed by the human 
constitution, and must be conceived of as attainable through 
man's exercise of his own God-created capacities. An ideal 
state which postulated the incursion of an extraneous power for 
its realization, would not be the ideal proper to humanity, but 
one that was capriciously and arbitrarily presented to it. To 
speak more generally, the law to which the creature is subject, 
not being imposed upon it from without by arbitrary fiat, but 
being immanent and constitutive of its very nature, a departure 
from or suspension of that law, however momentary or infini- 
tesimal, would involve the absolute subversion of the creature. 

By those theologians who postulate an exertion of mira- 
culous or creative energy for the dawn of life, or more 
generally for the introduction of higher forms of existence, 
it is admitted that these higher forms after their introduction 
lose their miraculous character and become with pre-existing 
nature subject to law ; but so far as we can perceive, there 
is no indication that by the introduction of Christianity 
there was thus naturalized in human life any divine or 
spiritual energy which did not belong to it, in germ at least, 
before that event. Man is still man within the area of 
Christendom. And as we know of no power or faculty 
which man ever possessed being lost to him by a fall, as 
little do we know of any such having been added to him 
by the regenerating influence of Christianity. Whatever 
change has taken place upon human life by this means has 
been the result, as we hope to show, of new ideas which have 
revealed themselves to man through the exercise of his 
spiritual faculties. The germ of all that is highest in 
religious development was present in man from the moment 
that the God-consciousness, or the knowledge of good and 
evil was kindled within him ; and we may be sure that 
there is nothing true in orthodox Christianity which may not 
be traced to that source. The only development of which 
humanity is susceptible is that of its germinal original en- 
dowment ; and if the human species were to go beyond 
that, it would cease to be human. To suppose that in the 
middle of a process of development a new and supernatural 
element may be thrown in to carry on the development to 



38 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

a height, which it could not otherwise reach, is against all 
analogy. A germ works itself out ; a development runs 
through all the stadia of its course ; but a new element 
would mean a new species. And if history and observation 
tell us anything, they tell us that there have been good 
men who never heard of Christianity, and that many who 
have believed in Christianity have remained bad. 

In theological language the added or supernatural element 
in the inner life goes by the name of divine grace : and 
according to Mr. R. H. Hutton {Contemp. Review, April, 1889), 
" Grace is a life poured in from outside." We may mis- 
understand Mr. Hutton's use of these words, but we take 
them to be a blunt, but certainly expressive definition of 
divine grace in its orthodox acceptation ; as a daemonic 
influence which enters into the life whether of individuals 
or of the Church at large. Such an acceptation of the 
word " grace," however vaguely it may be held, can hardly 
be distinguished from the crassest form of supernaturalism. 
We do not object to the use of the word to denote the 
beneficent action of the Nicht-Ich upon the Ich ; that is 
to say, the action upon us of all the circumstances and 
conditions of our lives, including the forces and influences 
amid which we are placed by Christianity. The Ich itself 
or individual consciousness is a creation of the Nicht-Ich : 
the last and greatest of its creations, because it has the 
distinction of enjoying a certain independence of the Nicht- 
Ich, a certain spontaneity of action on the exercise of 
which its subsequent history or growth depends. The Ich 
derives much, or rather all, from the Nicht-Ich ; only not 
in the direct form of a new life. For a new life could only 
be poured in at the expense of that very independence 
which is the distinctive quality of its nature. And this 
limitation of the action of the Nicht-Ich is important, 
because it preserves the idea of individual responsibility 
and of the identity of consciousness through all the flux of 
the circumstances and forces which tell upon us. No 
analogy drawn from the physical life gives us any warrant 
for supposing that spiritual life may be poured in from 
outside. Nutriment from without is converted into living 
tissue only by the selecting and assimilating action of the 
vital forces within the organism itself. When, therefore, Jesus 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 39 

is made to say, John vi. 63, "The words which I speak 
unto you, they are spirit and they are life," such language 
must be regarded as only figuratively and remotely true. 
His words do indeed nourish the spiritual life and minister 
to its growth ; but only by the interposed action of the 
spiritual life itself accepting his words and surrendering 
itself to their influence. His words are not the whole cause 
productive of that effect, yet it was this identification of the 
word with the life, initiated by St. Paul and consummated 
by the fourth Evangelist through his /^j-idea, that threw 
the glamour of mysticism over the whole subject of the 
religious process, and kept the true and scientific view of 
that process for many ages altogether out of sight. 
According to the teaching of Jesus, as we shall yet see, 
the spiritual life is not poured into the soul but is kindled 
or awakened in it by the revelation to the inward eye of 
the grace of God, or by the operation of those beneficent 
forces and influences upon us which go by that name. The 
difference between the two views may not seem to be great, 
but it marks the difference between the natural and the 
supernatural theory. 

But to return. Even on the principles of evolution there 
is confessedly a difficulty in explaining the entrance of life 
and consciousness into the world-system. It is inconceivable 
how living matter should proceed from matter not living ; 
or how the most rudimentary forms of life should be evolved 
from any form whatever of mere matter under any conditions 
however unusual, and however different from those now 
existing. The gap or interval, however minute in appearance, 
is felt to be immense and far too wide to be bridged and 
surmounted by the process of evolution, which follows the 
method of insensible and infinitesimal progression. The gap, 
indeed, seems to be impassable because we cannot trace or 
discern the presence of any germ of life in inorganic (or what 
to us seems inanimate) nature. On this account, the origin 
of life seems to be inconceivable in itself, and suggestive or 
postulant of a special act of creation. But there is obviously 
not the same difficulty in conceiving the development of 
higher forms of life out of those that are lower ; or the 
evolution of moral and intellectual powers out of the 
instincts of the lower animals ; inasmuch as in these latter 



40 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

there is a certain germ of intelligence plainly visible. And 
still less difficulty is there in conceiving or believing that the 
spiritual renovation effected by Christianity has been brought 
about without any special interposition. For, in the very 
lowest types of humanity, the moral and spiritual faculties 
and religious instincts are not absolutely awanting, but 
germinant ; so that, even if, as Dr. A. R. Wallace thinks, 
man's moral and intellectual powers have originated in an 
act of creation ; yet, such an act being granted, we cannot 
postulate a further creative act for the introduction of 
Christianity. 

Having thus endeavoured to justify our general position in 
regard to the impossibility of miracle, we wish before quitting 
this part of our subject to emphasize the statement that there 
is no reason to suppose that the phenomena presented by 
Christianity form any exception to the common law of the 
universe or to the fixed order of nature. Modern science does 
not admit that there is any presumption in favour of such an 
exception. The presumption is altogether the other way. 
For if every other department of things terrestrial and human 
is governed by immutable law, it is antecedently improbable, 
or even incredible, that the supremacy and immanency of law 
should cease at the threshold of the religious department. 
The unity which the mind postulates in the world, without 
and within us, forbids such an idea. If the law physical and 
moral, corresponding to the two forms of existence, did not 
extend on every side ; if the unseen power could not accomplish 
its highest ends except by departing from the common order 
and having recourse to an exceptional, unconformable and high 
handed interference with the autonomy of nature ; in what 
other light could this fact be regarded except as a sign of 
finitude and weakness, a confession that divine wisdom had 
encountered a contingency for which provision had not been 
made in the original draft or constitution of things, and that 
the defect or oversight had to be remedied by a sort of after- 
thought — not less an afterthought, though part of an eternal 
purpose. The conception of a universe carrying within itself 
its own law, which, however obscure or latent for unnumbered 
ages, yet, without fail comes forth into adequate operation as 
new emergencies and new conditions arise — this surely is a 
higher conception than that of a universe for which a new law, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 4 1 

or a supplemental and epicyclical mode of administration is 
requisite at some particular crisis ; and in which room is left, 
or occasions emerge for the direct intervention of some power 
which is conceived to be above law ; or for the operation of 
what has been called " a third kind of law." 

It may be affirmed in general with regard to all the great 
world-historical revolutions in the religious sphere, that they 
have been accompanied by a tendency on the part of those 
who were caught up in them, to trace them to the immediate 
hand and will of God ; to fill up blanks, and to throw light 
on obscure passages in the history of their origin and growth, 
by alleging the presence and operation at certain points of a 
palpably divine power. From the nature of the case, as 
already pointed out, the faith thus generated in the super- 
natural element cannot be overthrown by merely assailing 
what has come to be regarded as the historical evidence. This 
can only be done negatively by calling in question the possi- 
bility of miracle in any case whatever, and positively in the 
way to be here attempted, viz., by tracing step by step the 
sinuous course of the religious development according to the 
operation of natural psychological laws. In this inquiry, 
therefore, we assume the impossibility of miracle in the full 
and scriptural sense of the word ; on the ground that this 
assumption, even if it be a begging of the question, is not an 
idle or groundless assumption, but one that is based on the 
scientific study and observation of the universe. At the same 
time we do not rest here or depend solely on this " a priori 
consideration," but are compelled by a logical necessity to 
inquire further, how in the case of the gospel miracles, the 
faith in them could have gained a footing in the minds of 
men without having the fact of their occurrence as a base of 
origination. And if we succeed in this inquiry and discover 
such an explanation, we may then turn with some confidence 
to the believer in the possibility of miracle, and put it to him, 
whether, even though for him miracle be possible, it does not, 
by the law of parsimony, cease to be credible, when the faith 
of it in the early Church and its establishment in tradition may 
be accounted for otherwise than by the supposition of its actual 
occurrence. 

Against this mode of reasoning we do not know that any 
objection can be taken except by falling back upon the idea 



42 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

to which Cardinal Newman gives expression in his Apologia. 
Referring to the medicinal oil said to have flowed from St. 
Walburga's tomb, he makes the observation, that " in a given 
case, the possibility of assigning a human cause for an event 
does not, ipso facto, prove that it is not miraculous." If by 
these words Cardinal Newman meant that a certain divine 
action is mysteriously present in all natural development, this 
is what none but a materialist will call in question. But if 
the meaning be, as we rather think it is, that events and 
phenomena which can be accounted for by natural causes 
and human agencies do not exclude a special divine or mir- 
aculous interposition, his words breathe the concentrated spirit 
of the apologist, whose first and only aim is not to discover 
truth, but to defend a position already occupied. They seem 
to be connected with that yearning for a mystical view of the 
universe, or with that idea of angelic and subordinate agencies 
serving to supplement the scientific view of the physical and 
spiritual world, which from first to last dominated his thought. 
To this purely fanciful, and (in spite of the horror with which 
he would have regarded such an imputation) really gnosticising 
idea, he seems early to have surrendered himself, first, that he 
might be at liberty to interpret literally the figurative language 
in which the Old Testament describes natural phenomena, 
and ultimately to meet the draft of Roman Catholicism upon 
human credulity. But whatever be the explanation, the judg- 
ment expressed in the above words seems to us to go far to 
justify Carlyle's well known contemptuous estimate of the 
brain of this man of splendidly subtle intellect and rare literary 
genius. His dialectic is so powerful that his theology is 
assailable only in its assumptions, that is to say, by a method 
too radical for the ordinary Protestant controversialist to apply. 
The words of his which we have quoted, contain a proposition 
which can pass muster with the most acute minds, when they 
are dominated by an orthodox bias. We have observed that 
another eminent apologist (Dr. Wace, Nineteenth Century, May, 
1889, p. 719) has adopted it, even while at the same time, 
somewhat inconsistently, quoting with approbation " the fixed 
rule of philosophizing, according to Newton, that we should 
not assume unknown causes when known ones suffice." 

There is no doubt that the origin and history of Christianity 
are provisionally, or perhaps we should say approximately, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 43 

accounted for on the supernatural hypothesis, inasmuch as 
miracle supplies an apparently sufficient explanation of it — 
provided, indeed, we admit that the hypothesis of miracle, 
which is sufficient to explain everything, can be said to explain 
any phenomenon in particular. But, without dwelling on this 
proviso, we say that orthodox theologians are able, to their own 
satisfaction, to account for every phenomenon, and to explain 
away every difficulty — literary, exegetical, and historical — by 
the hypothesis of a supernatural factor, which, from its very 
nature, admits of being drawn upon to any extent. But if 
Christianity can be accounted for on the opposite hypothesis — 
i.e., by calling into view the spiritual forces and the progressive 
nature of humanity, then the supernatural idea will disappear 
from human thought and lose its sole remaining foothold in 
the human mind. For no one can possibly think of importing 
the supernatural element into Christianity, unless it be absol- 
utely indispensable — unless without it no sufficient reason can 
be shown for the faiths which Christianity has generated and 
for the effects it has produced. 

Many great writers, philosophical and theological, of the 
present century have, on this question of the supernatural in 
Christianity, spoken hesitatingly or ambiguously, or in a way 
which has been characterized as " schillernd" — a predicate for 
which we know of no equivalent in English, and which we can 
only paraphrase as a fusion or interplay of contradictory ideas, 
effected by a species of literary legerdemain. The truth 
seems to be, that in their laudable but mistaken apprehension 
for the safety of religion, these writers have endeavoured to 
reserve the impossibility of miracle as a covert and esoteric 
doctrine. But we conceive that the interests of religion in- 
volved are too grave to be thus treated, and that this doctrine 
should be avowed, and become by its open advocacy a factor 
in the common life and thought of man. A great thinker 
(Goethe) has said, " Aus einem thatigen Irrthum kann etwas 
Treffliches entstehen " (" An erroneous belief may form an im- 
pulse to worthy conduct "), but so far as this is true, it is true 
only so long as the error commands the assent of the intelli- 
gence of the age ; and it is only a doctrine which is in harmony 
with fact that can permanently and universally benefit society. 

In its negative aspect, then, scientific criticism sets aside the 
supernatural factor in the religious as well as in all other 



44 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

departments of human life. No miracle has ever happened, 
nor can happen, whether in the origin or in the history of 
religion — whether as evidential or constitutive of it. The idea 
of infallibility, whether in a church or in a book ; the idea of 
special inspiration, considered as a species of daemonic posses- 
sion of the human spirit by the divine ; the idea of divine grace 
considered as a " life poured in from outside," must alike be 
discarded. Positively, the assertion of scientific criticism is 
that all the changes which take place in the human mind, or 
within human experience, are evolved by psychological neces- 
sity, and in accordance with man's own nature. To say, with 
some apologists, that the influence of the invisible in the visible 
world is exercised in accordance with laws which, though un- 
knowable by us, do in fact regulate and determine the action of 
the divine power, is quite irrelevant and beside the mark. The 
influence exerted by that power must needs be limited by laws, 
which regulate the nature of the finite creature ; and in religion 
the divine Being can only operate upon us objectively through 
the common law of our nature, and subjectively through the 
idea or conception of himself, which has broken in upon our 
minds in the contemplation of ourselves and of the other works 
and existences by which we arrive at a knowledge of the divine 
Contriver and Author of all. We regard the supernatural as 
only the naive and provisional account of Christianity, congenial 
indeed to the thought of the age in which it originated, and to 
a theory of the universe which is now obsolete, but irrelevant 
to the thought and science which have been growing in consis- 
tency during the past three centuries. And if this be so, it 
follows that the New Testament, which gives a supernatural 
complexion to the origin and nature of Christianity, cannot be 
accepted by us as a close, satisfactory, authentic, and matter-of- 
fact record, but only as an approximate, and it may be ideal, 
mythical, or symbolical record of it. 

Arrived at this turning point in the discussion, we are re- 
minded that there are multitudes at this late time, even among 
educated and scientific men, who do not admit with us that 
the general question as to the supernatural is conclusively or 
definitively settled, but are disposed to think that the evidence 
and reasoning on both sides, negative and affirmative, are 
pretty equally balanced ; yet even for persons in this state 
of suspense, our discussion may not be without interest ; for 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 45 

without committing themselves in the meantime to one view 
or the other, they may regard our theory as to the genesis 
of Christianity as constructed on the basis of the supposition 
that there was nothing supernatural in the facts themselves, 
and that this complexion was given to them by the early 
tradition, and passed from it into the evangelic records which 
have come down to us. It is evident that if on the basis of 
this supposition we can satisfactorily or approximately account 
for the great faiths and facts of Christian history, it will go 
far to destroy whatever faith may yet survive in Christianity 
considered as a supernatural system. There will, as already 
remarked, be no inclination to import a miraculous element 
into events which can be otherwise accounted for. Let the 
admission even be made, that the scientific objection to the 
miraculous element of Christianity is balanced by the histori- 
cal evidence in its favour ; yet if it can be shown that the 
faith of the early Church in that element (which in point 
of fact constitutes that evidence) can be explained otherwise 
than by its reality, that element will cease to be credible. 
But in either case, i.e., whether we regard the miraculous 
element as conclusively or only as hypothetically set aside, 
it is evident that in dealing with the primitive records which 
represent that element as everywhere present, pervading and 
determinant, something more than a sound exegesis and 
hermeneutic will be needed to extract from them the proximate 
facts regarding the origin and development of the Christian 
system. We have only to make the attempt to find that we 
cannot effect the removal of the supernatural element, as if it 
were a mere appendage or external fixture, so as to leave the 
residuum standing as it was. That element is, so to speak, 
chemically combined with the history, and can be discharged 
only by a process which involves a change or dissolution of 
the entire fabric, or, if this be thought to be an exaggerated 
representation, let us say rather that it is an element woven 
like a strand into the texture of the history, so as to be 
removable only by a general disturbance and dislocation of 
the evangelical narrative. 

This consequence is most distinctly apparent in dealing 
with the fourth Gospel in which the discourses which form the 
bulk of the narrative must be dismissed along with the miracles 
which form their text and illustration. There arc, however, so 



46 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

many grounds for questioning the historical value of the fourth 
Gospel, that it can hardly be said to furnish a good example 
of what we are saying. But our remark holds true of the more 
historical synoptic Gospels. The introduction into these of 
supernatural elements implies such an empiric-dogmatic bias 
in the apprehension of the facts, and consequent metamorphosis 
of them, that we can hardly venture to say with certainty, 
even of one utterance reported of Jesus, that it proceeded 
from him in exactly the form of words in which it there 
appears. We can feel the ground secure under our feet, only 
when we accept as his the gnomic and parabolic form, and 
general spirit of the teaching ; the new and original spirit, which 
is undoubtedly traceable to him, being necessarily supposed to 
have created for itself the succinct and inimitably luminous 
form so level to popular taste and intelligence, which is char- 
acteristic of his teaching. The freshness of the ideas may, 
indeed, have communicated even to those who received them 
first hand from the great original, a power of .masterly, popular, 
vivid expression akin to that of the master himself. But there 
need be no hesitation in ascribing to Jesus whatever sentence 
or parable keeps upon the line of his teaching, and is a true 
utterance of the new spirit which he breathed into the world. 

The moment, however, we undertake to show that Christianity 
arose and took its present shape without being ushered in or 
accompanied by events which can in any sense be called 
miraculous or supernatural, the very attempt requires that we 
adopt a somewhat free treatment of the records, in order to 
feel our way to a reconstruction of the general outlines, and to 
catch the significance of the salient facts which we still regard 
as historically authentic. To deny the supernatural nature 
of the life and work of Jesus, and yet, with the majority of 
liberal theologians, to apply the usual verbal or textual exegesis, 
as sufficient to extract from the Gospels the actual data which 
underlie the history, is manifestly a halting and impotent 
procedure which cannot possibly lead to a satisfactory result, 
and amply accounts for the unprogressive, see-saw, distracted, 
and resultless course and condition of so-called liberal theology. 

In saying that modern theology, even of the more liberal 
school, is " unprogressive," we say so not unadvisedly. In 
the endeavour to bring the Pauline system of doctrine into 
accord with the growing thoughts of men (which is the inspir- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 47 

ing motive of the system building), the theology of the last 
three hundred years has indeed produced many variants of that 
system in long, or, let us say, exhaustive succession, but not 
one of these can be said to have made any real advance to the 
end at which all of them have aimed. This is widely felt at 
the present day, and it has begun to dawn upon the theolo- 
gical mind, that the obstacle which blocks the way to that 
accord is the supernatural element which is common to all 
alike. What progress there has been, is not towards a variant 
of the Pauline dogma satisfactory to the reason, for that is 
an impossible result; but towards the discovery that in theory 
the absolute religion, as taught by Jesus, is of utter and undog- 
matic simplicity, the only difficulty of which lies in the practice 
of it. In this qualified sense, we admit the progressiveness of 
modern theology, but in no other — in the sense, namely, that 
it is making progress towards its own extinction. 

In our view the religion of Jesus cannot be gathered 
from the Gospels or from the New Testament at large by 
textual criticism, however searching and however minute ; 
but by a higher criticism which may be called hyper- 
exegetical ; by a process more resembling the deciphering 
of a palimpsest, or the recovery of the history of ancient 
nations by the unearthing of their long-buried, long-forgotten 
monuments. We write with the conviction that, in a very 
short period of exceptionally active religious excitement, 
partly the cause and partly the effect of the report of the 
resurrection of Jesus, his sayings and doings were vermicu- 
larly overlaid by pious credulities and mythicizing fancies 
more effectually than were those ancient remains by the 
dust of ages. It is true that we have no means of weighing 
and judging probabilities in a matter of this kind by analogy 
or by comparison with what has taken place in any other 
corresponding case ; but, whatever may be said to the con- 
trary, and in spite of the principle which Neander employed 
to reconcile the many apparently conflicting data, viz. that 
Christianity while supernatural in its origin was natural in 
its development, we agree with the Roman Catholic in 
thinking that the religion of Jesus would have been preserved 
from such a fate had its origin been supernatural ; and that 
the same divine spirit, which presided over its birth, would 
have watched over the channels of its transmission. Whereas, 



4 8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

if it arose in the way of a natural development, it would 
necessarily be subject to all common vicissitudes ; and we 
sec nothing improbable in the supposition that its records 
may have been overlaid and transformed to almost any 
extent by frequent revision. But even so, the loss is not 
irremediable. For though the monuments, to which reference 
has just been made, were buried out of sight, yet, by what 
seems to be a common law, viz. that no thought perishes, 
the germs and principles of civilization of which they were 
the product and expression survived and continued to work 
among men. Even so w r e may suppose that the principles 
of the religion which Jesus enunciated continued under 
symbolic form to operate in the world. We have thus a 
sort of test, however delicate of application, to distinguish 
in the records between the pure and simple expression of 
these principles and those accretions which render them 
obnoxious to modern criticism. The endeavour to draw this 
distinction is bold and difficult ; but it is forced upon us 
in spite of ourselves by the slow but irresistible advance of 
the human mind. And if we can thus ascertain the 
principles from which the great historical movement started, 
we shall be the better able to trace the course by which 
it gradually assumed the symbolic orthodox form. What in 
our view gives importance to the attempt, is our belief that 
the few principles to which the teaching of Jesus gave pro- 
minence, constitute to this day, under the disguise of symbol 
and dogma, the preserving salt of Christianity. 

As we do not unreservedly accept the synoptic, or, let us 
say, the canonical data for the genesis of Christianity, it 
follows of course that in this inquiry we must proceed to 
some extent by the way of conjecture, which may be 
defined as an inference from the known to the unknown, and 
that many w r ill consider this acknowledgment as sufficient 
to condemn our entire undertaking. We may, therefore, 
observe that conjecture in the sense now indicated may 
have every degree of probability from the very lowest to 
the very highest or the most absolute certainty. It is 
resorted to, and in the most wholesale manner, as might 
easily be shown, by orthodox theologians in all their 
attempts to harmonize the Gospels ; and it comes largely 
into play also in all attempts to harmonize the canonical 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 49 

records generally, whether with what is called the profane 
history of the times or with the results of modern science. 
Every one who is acquainted with the methods of apologetic 
theology must be aware that it is a tissue of more or 
less doubtful probabilities. We do not urge this fact as an 
objection to apologetic theology, but only as a reason for 
not objecting to the employment of conjecture in this essay. 
A conjectural element must of necessity enter into the attack 
as well as into the defence of orthodoxy ; and the only 
question is, on which side upon the whole the conjecture is 
the least violent, on which side the greater probability lies, 
or on which side the understanding encounters the least 
resistance. 

In all critical and historical and even to some extent in 
scientific investigation, conjecture has a sphere of its own 
within whose limits it may render important services in the 
elucidation of truth. Our readers must determine for them- 
selves whether we observe or trangress these limits, and 
whether our use of this instrument be legitimate or the 
reverse. Every canonical fact or datum of which we make 
use may, when taken separately, admit of a construction 
different from that which we put upon it ; for that is only 
to say, that one conjecture or probable construction may be 
met by another or counter-conjecture. But the question is, 
whether the natural construction, as a whole, which we put 
upon Christianity is or is not sufficient to account for it ; or, 
to put it differently, whether there is not a likelihood that 
the miraculous element was introduced into its annals by 
men who, under the conditions of the then existing culture, 
could not possibly understand or explain it otherwise, rather 
than that that element was actually a factor in its origin. 

In one of the Present Day Tracts, Dr. Cairns says that 
" the genesis of systems is part of history ; and if history 
by the application of its ordinary methods cannot explain 
the Christian religion, as it does all others, on mere natural 
principles, it must recognize a miracle." But this, it is 
manifest, is to lay down an impossible condition for the 
explanation demanded ; for the simple reason that the 
ordinary methods of history cannot in this case be brought 
into play. The ordinary and, indeed, the only method by 
which modern historians arrive at an approximately con- 

D 



50 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

elusive knowledge of long past events, is by the collation 
comparison and questioning of the various, oftentimes dis- 
cordant contemporaneous accounts of them. But of the 
origin of Christianity we have substantially and really only 
one account, viz., that contained in the first three Gospels, 
which represents or reflects the tradition of the early church. 
And an observation may be made here, much the same as 
that made by Hermann Grimm with regard to Vasari's 
Lives of the Florentine Artists. He says that Vasari is 
the only one to give us information about many things ; 
and all comparison being out of the question, we can 
never be sure whether he invents the things, or writes upon 
reports which have a more solid foundation. Something of 
the same kind has been observed of the account which 
has come down to us of the Punic wars, respecting which 
no record has descended to us from Carthaginian sources. 
But more close to the point is what is remarked in the 
Nineteenth Century, October, 1887, by Mr. Justice Stephen. 
"It does now and then happen that it is possible to show 
(as by the discovery of documents not previously known), 
that the accepted version of a story is false, and that the 
true account of the matter is different. But in regard to 
the history of Christ this cannot be done, because all 
memories of the time and place have disappeared." It 
can at the most be shown that the " accepted accounts of 
many particular occurrences bear the well-known marks of 
legend as distinguished from genuine history " ; and hence, 
if we endeavour to recast the life of Jesus we are thrown 
upon conjecture, or that mode of reasoning which consists, 
as has just been said, in passing from the known to the 
unknown. Hence, too, considering the nature of the prob- 
lem before us, and the limitation of our sources of knowledge, 
it would be unfair of the reader to demand at ever}- point 
or step a degree of probability and a precision of statement, 
of which the subject and the means for its treatment at 
our command do not admit. He should be prepared to 
find that there is a tone of indecision in many of our 
remarks, and that the obscurity which rests on some 
points is not wholly lifted. It is not to be expected that 
every detail in our construction should carry conviction ; 
but the intrinsic consistency of the whole may come near 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 I 

it. Our construction is not like a chain, of which the 
weakest link determines the strength of the whole ; but like 
a building, whose solidity is not materially impaired by the 
presence in it, here and there, of a defective stone. 

Let it be observed, moreover, that our employment of 
conjecture is restricted ; not arbitrary nor fanciful ; not 
atomic or opportunist in the sense of being without any 
fixed principle except that of assailing the orthodox position 
in detail. On the contrary, our conjecture will be found to 
be systematic in form, guided and suggested throughout by 
a certain view of the religious relation and of the springs 
and principles which it sets in motion. In its material 
aspect that relation was made known to mankind by Jesus, 
when he proclaimed the paternal character of God and the 
supreme value of the soul and the inwardness of the religious 
life. Taken by itself, this view of the relation favoured, if 
it did not solicit, the doctrine of supernaturalism, or so to 
speak, of a paternal government of the world as opposed 
to the constitutional. But modern science has irresistibly 
conducted or is conducting us to the formal or ideal aspect 
of that relation by which all that is supernatural is dis- 
charged from it. According to this aspect of it, the religious 
instinct is drawn out, the religious relation is maintained, not 
by any objective divine agency whether prevenient or subse- 
quent to faith in the soul of man, but simply by the power 
with which the evangelic idea of that relation, as revealed 
by Jesus, appeals to the soul of man. Of this we shall have 
much to say as we proceed. 

Let it be borne in mind, further, that what we here 
primarily attempt is neither a historical nor a literary criti- 
cism of the books of the New Testament ; nor an explanation 
of the genesis of these books, such as modern criticism has 
made us familiar with : but mainly an investigation of the 
genesis of Christianity itself, of which these books contain 
an account, proceeding on the basis of the supernatural and, 
therefore, not satisfactory to the scientific conscience. The 
very nature of this investigation obviously requires us to relin- 
quish the idea of a close adherence to the Scripture record. 
We subscribe heartily to what Dr. Bruce says, that " it is the 
miraculous element in the Gospels which chiefly raises the 
question as to their historical trustworthiness. Eliminate 



52 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that element and hardly a doubt would remain ; the residuary 
words and deeds of Jesus would be welcomed as proof that 
in Judaea there once lived a sage and philanthropist of un- 
paralleled wisdom and goodness." The effect of these words 
is that, apart from the miraculous element, the gospel history 
would satisfy us, not only that the man Jesus had really lived, 
but that his doctrine showed him to be a man of unparalleled 
wisdom and goodness. This comes very near to saying, that 
the miraculous element is unessential to the history, and that 
the doctrine of Jesus carries in itself an evidence of its truth. 
But Dr. Bruce does not trust to this evidence, and feels it 
necessary, as he says, to occupy " the platform of the sub- 
stantial historicity of the Gospels," inclusive of the miraculous 
narratives. Now we do not say that this somewhat Janus- 
like position is untenable, but only that we hold a very 
different position. It seems to us that to leave the super- 
natural element standing in the Gospels, as Dr. Bruce pro- 
poses, is to abandon all genuine historical criticism and to 
perpetuate the historical confusion. To remove that element, 
on the other hand, is to leave nothing standing beyond the 
general outline of the life of Jesus, and his ethical and religious 
teaching in its main form and substance. The Christian 
phantasy, which imported the supernatural element into the 
history, was capable also of modifying to some extent the 
forms of expression, but would hardly be tempted to alter 
the general scope of the teaching: nor can it be credited with 
the creation and invention of a style so marked and indi- 
vidualized in character, so congruent and helpful to the 
spirit and substance of the doctrine. There is, therefore, 
every reason to believe that many of the discourses of Jesus 
are reproduced all but verbally in the synoptic Gospels, though 
there is internal evidence that the order and arrangement 
have undergone much alteration ; attributable, there is little 
doubt, partly to the uncertainties of the oral tradition and 
partly to the literary discretion of the compilers of the Gospels. 
And there is a pervading unity of spirit and of purpose in 
the teaching of Jesus which puts into our hands a test of 
the genuineness of each separate utterance ascribed to him. 

The objection may here suggest itself, indeed, that, by 
admitting the presence of a revising, mythical, and embellish- 
ing element in the Gospel history, we make it impossible to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 3 

discriminate between what is real and what is fictitious ; we 
allow the hitherto solid structure of Gospel history to dissolve 
in our hands, and create a prejudice against every attempt 
to construct an approximately genuine theory or history of 
the origin of Christianity from the primitive records. 

Something of this kind has been said by Grote and others 
of the legendary history of the early or so-called heroic ages 
of Greece. The works of Homer, it has been said, throw no 
light whatever upon the ages to which they refer ; and their 
whole historical value lies in conveying to us indirectly and 
undesignedly a vivid picture of the thinking and acting of 
the age to which the poet himself belonged. Now, it may 
be true, by the same rule, that, according to the theory of 
Volkmar, some of the elements of Gospel history really reflect 
and embody the beliefs and experiences of Christians of the 
early age in which they were compiled. But it is a manifest 
exaggeration to say, as Volkmar inclines to do, that the 
Gospels are a history of the Christian community under the 
veil of a life of Jesus its founder. The doctrinal teaching of 
Jesus, and his life as illustrative of that, as described in the 
Gospels, have a truth and a value quite independent of, and 
separable from the supernatural aspect under which he is 
presented to us : they contain elements, moreover, which we 
cannot possibly account for, except by tracing them to him, 
or to a great spiritual movement of which he was the head 
and centre. The Gospels owe, if not their only, yet their 
main value to that system of thought which is incorporated 
in the direct and parabolic teaching of Jesus ; and to the 
record which they contain of a life, which, in its general 
features, and independent of miraculous events, proves the 
height to which human nature may rise, and which the 
miraculous colouring serves in some measure to obscure. 

Arrived now at the point of applying the foregoing re- 
marks on the supernatural to Christianity, the question may 
suggest itself, whether a high expediency may not counsel a 
policy of reticence or reserve on this subject. Among the 
cultured and even the scientific classes there are many who 
have discarded, so far as they themselves are concerned, all 
belief in the supernatural character of Christianity, but are 
yet of opinion that, for the sake of the great masses of 
mankind, it is, and ever will be, necessary to present Christ- 



54 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

ianity as a special message direct from heaven, or as a divine 
institution for human salvation ; and that it would be dan- 
gerous to all the higher interests of society to dispel the 
illusion, lest the moral and religious ideas, the registered 
wisdom and experience of many ages, imbedded in Christ- 
ianity, should become the sport of the vulgar, sceptical in- 
tellect ; and lest with the warrant and sanction derived from 
their higher origin, they should also lose their legitimate 
salutary influence upon men's minds. But all such politic 
considerations, and the scruples to which they give rise, seem 
to us to savour of a somewhat low and time-serving ex- 
pediency, and are here set aside, because we believe that 
Christianity carries its authority within itself, and that to 
know the truth and to see things as they are is good for 
man in the end. It is also very questionable whether an 
esoteric treatment of this or any subject is feasible, or can 
be long successful in the age upon which we have fallen, 
when every true thought is able to publish itself through a 
thousand channels and to become a common possession. 

Whatever we may fondly wish, we must bow to the necessity 
of the case. We may rest assured that in his pursuit of 
spiritual truth, man must drop the cut-and-dry notion of a 
deus ex machina, or of a supernatural revelation, for, that on 
such easy terms, the race cannot hope to reach its goal on any 
of the great lines of its endeavour. But in lieu of that notion 
we have our finite reason, which, being itself spirit, has the 
idea of absolute spirit, or simply the pure idea germinant in 
its consciousness. The whole development of ethical and 
religious thought depends upon this idea, which, floating before 
the human soul, draws man's thoughts upwards to itself. And 
this grand fact is explanatory of much in the history and 
evolution of religion. For the idea has a twofold aspect, or 
rather a twofold mode of action, of which the one seems, but 
only seems, to undo the work of the other. Through popular 
feeling and imagination there is a tendency in the idea at 
every stage of its development to incorporate itself in ritual 
and myth, in symbol and dogma : that is to say, in some 
positive form or system of religion, as, e.g., in Judaism and 
Christianity. And the idea for which the symbol and dogma 
are thus created becomes in time corrosive of these, when 
the reflection grows to a head that they do not fully or 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 5 

adequately represent it. When this has taken place, the same 
mental activities proceed at the bidding of the idea to create 
some more adequate symbol, which, in its turn is set aside 
by the solvent power of the intellect, which, as distinct from 
the reason, has the important function of bringing all thought 
and action to the test of the idea. And this process goes 
on till, in this age of advanced thought, the idea is aiming to 
find its full expression by assailing the supernatural theory of 
the divine government: the discovery having dawned upon the 
human mind that nature itself is the only true and absolute 
symbol of the divine. The unique place which Jesus occupies 
in the development of religious thought lies in this, that in him 
and in his doctrine the idea reached the purest possible, though 
finite and practical, or, let us say empiric expression: of which 
expression it only remains to his followers to find the scientific 
form and to draw the consequences in thought and practice. 
As for the dogma of the early Church we shall see that it 
was no true development of the thought of Jesus, but mainly 
a sensuous representation, or plastic metamorphosis of it, 
dictated by pious feeling and imagination : a view of the 
dogma which in part explains its tenacious possession of the 
mind of Christendom and the power of its appeal to this 
day to the common heart. But that it performs a psedagogic 
function is the most that can be claimed for it. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE FUNCTION OF JESUS AS A TEACHER. 

If that theory of the divine government which has now- 
been set forth be accepted, its logical and necessary conse- 
quence is to make havoc of the orthodox dogma concerning 
the person and the functions of the founder of Christianity. 
It is no longer possible to regard Jesus as an incar- 
nation of the divine Being, who wrought miracles, and 
by his death made atonement for the sins of men, and 
rose again from the dead, and afterwards ascended into 
heaven in the presence of his disciples; but as one who by 
lature and from first to last was a member, pure and 
simple, of the human family — a link of the human chain 
just as any of ourselves are : having all the properties of 
human nature, but those of no other : as one whose nature, 
faculty, and character, were to the same extent with those 
of other men the product of his ancestry and of his 
surroundings ; and whose life and work went to determine 
and to influence the life and history of succeeding generations. 
What he did was to impart to men a higher view of their 
duty and of their relation to God, and to die as a martyr 
to the truths which he proclaimed. In a word, we set aside, 
in virtue of our general principle, the so-called " central facts " 
of Christianity, whether as constitutive of our religion or 
evidential of its truth. Just because these are professedly 
supernatural we can regard them not as facts at all, but as 
mere accretions, or, as we shall yet more particularly see, as 
a vestment woven for the spiritual substance of Christianity 
under the stimulus of the spectacle or memory of a life, 
which apart from such facts was sufficiently wonderful in 
itself. Along with the so-called facts we also set aside the 



NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. $7 

doctrines of mediation, propitiation, and intercession, which 
stand or fall with the facts. It is impossible for us to believe 
that Jesus altered God's relation to us, or restored it to what 
it once was — which is the only meaning we can attach to 
such offices and functions — but only that he altered our views 
of what that relation really is : that he was one of that select 
band of religious teachers who have from age to age brought 
the thoughts of men nearer to the truth of things : and the 
very greatest of them all. Like others of that small and 
sacred band, he was a teacher not in the narrow sense of the 
word, but in its widest sense. He certified his doctrine and 
rendered it impressive to the minds of his disciples by illu strat- 
ing it in his own person and conduct, and so enlisting their 
sympathy in its behalf. 

We have said that Jesus was a teacher in the widest sense 
of the word, and it is necessary to bear this in mind. No 
doubt it is to his teaching in the narrower sense, as preserved 
to us in the synoptists, that we must primarily look for the 
definition of that ethical ideal and that conception of God 
which are the constituent and elementary principles of his 
religion. And it cannot be questioned that he was possessed 
of an unrivalled gift of terse and pregnant utterance, and could 
adequately interpret into common language the facts of his 
own experience, which were at once the source and the result 
of his religious insight. But the thought which he endeavoured 
to communicate to his disciples as the medium of imparting 
impulse and influencing life was communicated in part at 
least through his own manner of acting and suffering, or 
through the life which he led, quite as much as by the form 
and substance of his oral teaching. Not merely did he address 
the intellect of his hearers or appeal merely by word of mouth 
to their moral and rational nature ; but over and above this, 
by his evident superiority to the common weaknesses of 
humanity, by his patience under contumely, by his deep 
tenderness and forbearance, by his singleness of purpose, by 
his zeal for the temporal and spiritual good of others, by his 
serene confidence in the love of God, which no strait or 
danger could disturb ; by all these traits of character, we say, 
he imposed on imagination, enlisted sympathy, awakened 
enthusiasm, and gained for himself personally the devotion 
of all who were sensitive to spiritual impressions. That 



58 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

principle of love, which according to him was the fulfilment 
of the law, and the moving principle of God's dealings with 
men, became a reality for the disciples by virtue of the 
supreme exhibition of it in his own life of self-sacrifice. He 
embodied and exemplified in his own conduct and character 
the very truths which he taught, the self-sacrifice which he 
inculcated. In the conflict which he provoked with the 
accredited teachers of his people, he had the opportunity un- 
sought, but forced upon him, of exhibiting without intermission 
all the highest qualities of his nature, and especially those 
passive virtues which entered so largely into his rule of life, 
and were so new comparatively, even in name, to the ancient 
world. By personal fidelity to his own rule he stamped the 
beauty and the obligation of it upon that small circle who 
were the witnesses of his career, and afterwards went forth, in 
the persuasion that such a life was eternal, to spread the 
knowledge and the practice of it among men. By the exhibi- 
tion, faultless to all human judgment, of his own transcendent 
ideal in the conduct of his own life, he exercised that truly 
daemonic faculty of impressing the minds of his immediate 
followers, and charged with intenser power that attraction 
which the ideal of itself always exerts more or less on human 
hearts. 

In that concrete and living form his great ideas became 
luminous to the humblest intellect. However slow of heart, 
his followers could not fail to see in him the living impersona- 
tion of the graces which he inculcated. In fact his teaching 
did little but throw light on his life, and help them to 
appreciate the beauty of that. And it would not be wrong 
to say that his discourses were but the exponents of his own 
experience, and interpreted his own example, helping the 
disciples to gather the lesson which it conveyed and to under- 
stand and become alive to what was passing under their eyes : 
the lesson of whose import, just because it was passing 
before them, they were apt to miss or overlook. It may be 
truly said that his life was but the object-lesson by which, 
unintentionally we believe, he impressed his doctrine upon his 
disciples. 

We say unintentionally, for, while intent on being true to 
his own ideal of righteousness, Jesus exerted over his disciples 
an imposing and commanding influence, which was probably 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 59 

undesigned on his part, as it was probably unconscious on 
theirs. The manifestation of the higher life as a means of 
swaying the minds of his disciples and drawing them through 
the sympathetic forces of their nature into fellowship with 
himself may never have entered into his thoughts. There 
is certainly no trace of conscious self-manifestation in the 
synoptic Gospels, if perhaps we except Matth. xi. 28, 29, a 
passage whose perfect beauty, for reasons elsewhere given, 
does not convince us of its authenticity. The probability is 
that the exhortation to learn meekness and lowliness from 
his example was only the interpretation of what the disciples 
had been made to feel, put by them afterwards into his mouth. 
For we can hardly help thinking that this idea of conscious 
self-manifestation on the part of Jesus, though it is a leading 
one and architectonic in the construction of the fourth Gospel, 
is foreign to the simplicity and self-forgetfulness of the mind 
of Jesus, as well as untrue to nature, and constitutes an 
essential and fundamental blemish in that work of splendid 
genius. Still we hold that the " personal influence of Jesus, 
though unconscious on both sides, was of magical efficacy. 
It appealed to the higher nature of the disciples with a force 
which his mere teaching could never have exerted. 

The man whose mind is thoroughly made up, as was the 
mind of Jesus, to a certain course of conduct, to brave death 
and all possible extremities in following it out, is thereby 
endowed with superhuman strength, and naturally takes the 
lead and acquires ascendency over those who hesitate and 
live in doubt. The spectacle of such a man submitting with- 
out visible effort, and with a foregone determination, to the 
yoke of righteousness in its sternest aspects, and enduring 
hardship and mortification without a murmur, and facing the 
prospect of a cruel and ignominious death without shrinking, 
was sufficient to inspire awe for his person and to lend 
authority to his words. These remarks will indicate what is 
meant by saying that Jesus was a teacher in the wider sense 
of the word, and that his power as such was greatly, or rather 
mainly, due to his personal qualities ; to the illustration in his 
conduct of the doctrines which he taught. Apart from his 
personality, his discourses would have led to little or no 
practical result, and he could never have " laid his mind " so 
effectually upon his disciples, nor have imparted to them that 



60 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

initial impulse which carried them on, step by step, and 
enabled them to give a new start to the religious history of 
mankind. Plato's ideal had many points of contact with that 
of Jesus, but then it remained a mere ideal : it, so to speak, 
" abode alone," not mingling with nor acting upon the springs 
of life ; whereas that other, by the sympathy which it 
awakened, sank deep into human hearts and brought forth 
much fruit (John xii. 24). 

That we do not take an exaggerated view of the impression 
made upon the disciples by the personality of Jesus, or by 
the faultless illustration in his person of the high ideal which 
he had kindled in their minds, may be inferred with some 
probability from the analogous cases of Zoroaster, Buddha, 
and the better authenticated case of the great Chinese sage. 
The last of these was, perhaps, the most unimpassioned and 
unemotional of all the great men who have made their mark 
in the religious history of the world, and yet Dr. Legge says 
that " one of the most remarkable things connected with him 
is the impression which he made on his disciples. Many of 
these were among the ablest men in China of their time, and 
yet with them originated the practice of speaking of Con- 
fucius as the greatest man that ever lived. He won their 
entire admiration. They began the paean which has since 
resounded through all the intervening ages, nor is its swell 
less loud and confident now than it was 24 centuries ago." 
This historical fact is one of a group which renders it credible 
that by sheer moral grandeur Jesus too may have made a 
profound impression upon his disciples, and that the tradition 
to that effect was not a mere mythical creation, but a 
reminiscence of an actual fact which was indispensable, as 
will yet be shown, to the origin of the mythical history. 

As a teacher the highest aim and function of Jesus was, 
by word and deed, to imbue those who listened to him with 
his own ideas, to make them look at things with the same 
eyes as he did, to raise them to the level of his experience, 
and to awaken in them a religious consciousness similar to 
his own, that they might live and act accordingly. It was 
that and nothing more. But the Christian Church, the com- 
munity or congregation of those who felt and bowed to the 
influence of his teaching, and embraced the way of life of 
which he set the example, has always wished to see more in 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 6 I 

him than a teacher, even in the most extended sense of the 
word. In the primitive documents of Christianity, in the 
books of the New Testament, he is represented as something 
more ; and the Church ever since has striven to vindicate for 
him a rank presumably higher ; regarding it as a degradation 
or but a scant honour to think or speak of him merely as 
a discoverer or revealer of truth, and not as the very truth 
itself; or to regard his revelation as aught else or aught 
less than a self-revelation. His doctrine has been esteemed 
as of secondary worth, as merely interpretative of his person 
and function, and as deriving from this circumstance its whole 
value and significance. By St. Paul and St. John, and by the 
orthodox generally, Jesus has been regarded as the Mediator 
of a new relation between God and man ; and by modern 
supernaturalists, as the Bearer of a new power into human 
life, or of a new life superimposed upon the natural or 
physical life of humanity, akin to the introduction of the 
vital principle into inorganic nature : so that his office or 
function as a religious Teacher has come to be regarded as 
quite subordinate and ministrant, only necessary to awaken 
men's faith and to gain their rational and voluntary co- 
operation in the process of redemption. 

But what we insist upon is that the Church did not learn 
this from himself, and received no encouragement from his 
teaching to look upon him as a Redeemer. He gave no 
sanction to such a view of his office and function. He did 
not present himself to his countrymen as more than a teacher 
of righteousness, or, let us say, of religion ; and the impression 
made upon them was not owing to any such unfounded claim 
on his part. If this be a fact, as we shall now endeavour 
to render probable, it is important to bear it in mind, because, 
as already hinted, we wish in what follows to ascertain exactly, 
or as near as may be, the nature of those influences which 
he brought to bear upon those around him : how he made 
the initial impression upon his followers : how the disciples 
were prepared to retain their faith in him in spite of his 
crucifixion, and even on reflection to rise to the conception 
of him as a heavenly and divine being : in a word, how they 
were led to a point at which the dogmatic view of his 
person and office impressed itself on their minds. 

Had Jesus ever presented himself to his disciples as their 



62 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Redeemer, in the orthodox sense of the word, we could, 
from our point of view, only have regarded it as a proof 
that he was labouring under a form of delusion : for we take 
it to be an utterance approved by the deepest reason of 
ancient as well as modern times, that " no man can save 
his brother's soul, nor pay his brother's debt," or as the 
Psalmist says, " None can by any means redeem his brother, 
nor give to God a ransom for him." But what we here call 
attention to is, that he did not in his teaching seek to 
impress his disciples with that view of his person, and that 
we have no reason for thinking that the impression which 
he made on his disciples during his lifetime was at all owing 
to such a claim. We see in the synoptic Gospels many 
grounds for the belief that he never claimed to stand in 
such a relation or to perform such an office to his fellow-men. 
Such a claim would have been quite at variance with the 
rest of his teaching. 

The idea of the fatherliness of God which he so emphati- 
cally proclaimed seems to exclude the necessity of expiation 
or redemption by a third person. For who is there who has 
not many times felt the difficulty of reconciling the two 
doctrines ; who has not been conscious that the idea of fatherly 
love is troubled and perplexed when he is required to believe 
that it is conditioned by the sacrifice of another in his behalf? 
This is a condition, besides, to which we find no allusion 
made where we might naturally expect to find it, had it 
entered into the thought of Jesus. We miss it, for example, 
in his form of prayer ; where, if anywhere, an allusion might 
have been expected to a fact which, if it were a fact, had 
been necessarily determinant of that consciousness with which 
he sought to imbue his followers. We miss it also in the 
parable of the prodigal son, in which we have the most 
touching representation of God's treatment of His penitent 
children ; and in which the unmediated connection between 
the son's penitence and the father's forgiveness is the point 
which forms the very nerve of the narrative and the centre 
of interest. The intention of the parable is to accentuate 
the principle that divine love in all its manifestations is 
absolutely unconditioned and unfettered, with the exception, 
if it can be called an exception, that the penitent adopt as 
the law of his conduct the principle of which forgiveness is 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 6$ 

the manifestation, and thus place himself in harmony with 
the divine will. Add to this, that had Jesus really thought 
himself predestined to make atonement for human sin: had 
such an idea been a substantive part of his teaching, it had 
necessarily been central and salient, and had given a tone 
and colouring to the whole of it. That he should, in that 
case, have allowed it to remain in the background, or have 
refrained from giving it a conspicuous and commanding place, 
is hardly conceivable. He must have done so by a species 
of " economy," which Roman Catholic theologians have found 
to be a useful idea in controversial straits ; but of which, so 
far as we can see, Jesus made little or no use. 

Still it must not be overlooked that Jesus is represented 
in the New Testament as claiming for himself a redemptive 
function. We do not here take into account his teaching in 
the fourth Gospel, because, for reasons to be afterwards stated, 
we hold it to be a wholly unauthentic record ; and, also, 
because it does not represent Jesus as claiming such a function 
in the common or Pauline sense of the word. But it must 
be admitted that in the synoptic Gospels there are at least 
two ut L erances of his which may, with some plausibility, be 
interpre'-ed in reference to himself as fulfilling the function 
of a Redeemer. On his fatal journey to Jerusalem he is 
reported to have said, " The son of man came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom 
for many " ; and at the institution of the last supper he is 
represented as speaking of his blood as being " shed for many 
for the remission of sins." 

Now, were we to regard these exceptional sentences as 
genuine utterances of Jesus, we could hardly but regard them 
also as the germs from which the dogma of the atonement 
was subsequently developed by the Church. But it is by no 
means certain that the evangelists have, in either instance, 
given an exact reproduction of the words of Jesus ; for it 
must be borne in mind that both of these sayings were placed 
on record, not before, but after the dogmatizing tendency had 
set in ; not before, but after St. Paul had written his great 
epistles : and we may, therefore, with some confidence attribute 
words so isolated in the Gospels to the colouring process 
which the teaching of Jesus underwent in the course of its 
transmission by a society in which the ideas of atonement 



64 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and expiation, as applied to his death, had, by independent 
links of association, become prevalent. So long as we credit 
Jesus with sobriety of judgment, our guiding principle of 
criticism, viz., the rejection of the supernatural element, for- 
bids us to regard these sayings as genuinely his. We must 
regard them, as we do many other sayings attributed to him, 
as reflections on the part of his disciples touching his death, 
put by the mythical tradition into a form of words spoken 
by himself. It is more than likely that the dogma would 
seek to authenticate itself, or to be reflected in the life and 
teaching of Jesus ; just as, in almost all cases, ideas prevalent 
in the time of a historian are apt to colour and transform 
his narrative of past events. It is manifest that by attribut- 
ing to Jesus, in the prospect of his death, words and sayings 
expressive of their own reflections with regard to that event, 
the disciples adopted a means of stamping these reflections 
with irresistible authority, besides placing the character and 
work of Jesus in a transcendent and peculiarly affecting light. 
Jesus might declare with truth that he esteemed it to be his 
aim and mission in the world " not to be ministered unto, 
but to minister " ; for these words do but express, in forcible 
and popular terms, that intense enthusiasm for the highest 
interests of humanity, and that resolved devotion of himself 
to the good of man, of which he, as well as the greatest of 
his disciples (Phil. ii. 17) was conscious. We have, therefore, 
no ground to doubt that these words were uttered by him, 
but the remaining words, " and to give his life a ransom for 
many," unless they were added in the course of oral trans- 
mission, were in all probability a marginal gloss or dogmatic 
expletive, which in the course of time became incorporated 
with the text. 

A similar result may be arrived at in regard to the words 
used by Jesus when he instituted the last supper. These 
words are reported in much the same form by all three 
synoptists, and the concurring testimony of St. Paul is sup- 
posed to confirm their historical character. From St. Paul's 
account in the first epistle to the Corinthians of what took 
place on that occasion, we can see that there existed even in 
his time much diversity of opinion as to what had actually 
been said and done in that upper room, as well as to the 
nature and intention of the usage itself which had grown up 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 65 

in memory of it ; just as we at the present day are far 
from agreed as to these points. We can hardly accept of 
St. Paul's testimony as to the expressions used by Jesus on 
the occasion, seeing that we are told by him that he claimed 
to settle doubts in regard to the usage which had grown up 
in connection with them, not because he had had communica- 
tion on the subject with those who were present at the 
institution, but because he had received a communication in 
regard to it from the Lord himself (1 Cor. xi. 23). Not only 
is this the plain meaning of his words in 1 Cor. xi. 23, but, 
taken in connection with his emphatic averment that the 
gospel which he preached was not after man, but came to 
him by revelation of Jesus Christ, every other meaning is 
excluded. What remains to be said of this averment will be 
reserved till we come to speak of the Pauline epistles. 

We are tempted to suppose that the apostle had seen the 
necessity of placing the seal of his apostolic authority upon 
one of the various forms of the tradition respecting the last 
meal which Jesus partook of with his disciples, by way of 
settling disputes, of repressing the irregularities which had 
gathered round the usage, and of utilizing it as a bond of 
union between Christians, inasmuch as, by its very nature as 
a visible rite, it was better fitted for that purpose than any 
mere abstract formula or symbol of belief. It was quite in 
the manner and fashion of the great apostle to regard the 
outcome of his own matured reflections as a revelation from 
the Lord. That he should have seen in the rite a confirmation 
of the dogma ; that he should have cast the tradition into a 
form in harmony with it, and also that his version of the 
incident should have been incorporated in the evangelical 
tradition, was only what we might expect. 

We submit, therefore, that there is no unimpeachable 
authority for saying that Jesus in his teaching gave counten- 
ance to the ideas of atonement and expiation ; that he either 
regarded himself or encouraged his disciples to regard him as 
a Redeemer in the dogmatic or supernatural sense. If he 
gave any ground to his disciples for so regarding him it was 
not intentionally by anything which he said, but unwittingly, 
by the imposing grandeur of his character, by his claim to 
be the Messiah, and by the heroism of his death. The great 
and manifest object of all his ministry was like that of other 

E 



66 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

religious teachers, such as Buddha and Zoroaster, to teach 
and induce his disciples to redeem themselves, and to rouse 
them to the effort necessary to their self-elevation spiritually 
and morally. This is the only sense in which we can regard 
him as a Redeemer. In other words, we regard him simply 
as a great teacher, and it is necessary to explain our meaning 
in so saying. 

In the first place, it is to be observed that, consistently 
with the denial of the supernatural element, we cannot admit 
that he was qualified for the teacher's office by supernatural 
illumination or specfal inspiration. We cannot admit him to 
be an absolute authority in morals or religion, or admit, in- 
deed, that there is any such authority except in the collective 
reason and conscience of man, however fallible these may be, 
and however difficult to ascertain their verdict amid the 
clamour and conflict of strange and discordant voices. We 
can accept of even Jesus as an authority only in so far as 
his doctrine and example appeal to reason and to conscience. 
By disowning the supernatural element at this point we 
preserve the supremacy of these as the sole and ultimate 
arbiters in the religious sphere. To admit the presence and 
action of that element at any point in the genesis and history 
of Christianity is, as we have seen, to set Christianity at 
variance with the requirements of modern science ; and, we 
may here add, to introduce into human life an insufferable 
and bastard dualism, of which, in modern times, the spirit of 
intolerance, the papal claim to infallibility, and the conflict 
between Church and State (even in its most constitutional 
form), are the necessary manifestations ; the last, a conflict in 
which no modus vivendi and no pragmatic sanction can do 
more than effect a temporary lull. But even to limit the 
presence of a supernatural element (as some apologists seem 
inclined to do in the last resort) to the point of which we 
are here speaking, i.e., to regard Jesus as being entrusted with 
a divine commission to reveal the truth, is to lay an embargo 
on human reason, and to make way for another authority 
sufficient by its weight to crush the authority of reason and 
conscience. 

A recent apologist of Protestantism, as against Roman 
Catholicism, has taken up the position that the authority of 
Jesus is co-ordinate with that of conscience ; for this, we 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 67 

suppose, is what he means when he says that Jesus is an 
authority " in the sense that conscience is," whereas " the 
Church is an authority only in the sense that law and 
legislature are authorities " (Fairbairn). The same position 
is, we think, taken up by Volkmar, one of the most advanced 
among German theologians ; but this position is of the nature 
of a compromise, which will neither repel the Catholic attack, 
nor satisfy the true idea which underlies Protestantism, and, 
indeed, every revolt against the authority of mere tradition. 
That idea is, that human reason is the very highest authority 
to which the ultimate appeal must be made in religion as in 
all else, and that all other or outward authority, including 
that of Jesus and of the Church, must verify or approve 
itself to this which is within us, i.e. to the collective reason of 
humanity. And it is our belief that the interests of religion, 
or, let us say, of Christianity are not imperilled by such an 
avowal : for that the great ideas of Christianity, as having 
their authority in themselves, can dispense with an infallible 
Founder and a miraculous history ; and that the Founder, 
though not infallible, still retains our veneration, because the 
doctrine which he taught does appeal to our reason, while 
he himself becomes not less, but more lovable and more 
marvellous, by the recognition of his simple humanity. 

As now our fundamental principle forbids us to admit that 
Jesus could derive his doctrine from any special or abnormal 
source, so it is of great importance for this inquiry into the 
origin of Christianity that we are able to affirm that he 
advanced no claim of the kind ; that he never asserted nor 
implied that his knowledge of divine things was reached by 
direct, unmediated communication from God, rather than by 
the ordinary channels through which truth reaches the minds of 
men ; or that he was favoured with a species of inspiration, 
which put him in infallible possession of the truth and left no 
room for error or misconception. It is of great importance 
to be assured of this, because, as already said, we wish to 
ascertain the initial steps by which Jesus made an impression 
on the minds of his disciples. It is well to know that, whether 
intentionally or unintentionally, he did not seek to impose upon 
the minds of men, as other teachers have done, by claiming to 
be inspired or to stand in direct communication with God. 
He did not profess to derive his doctrine through such a 



68 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

channel ; and the awe which he inspired, the authority with 
which he spoke, was not due to the effect which such a claim 
has often had, when confidently advanced and supported by 
the accident of favouring circumstances. The words attributed 
to him, which seem most nearly to approach to such a claim, 
are those of Matth. xi. 27 and Luke x. 22 : " All things are 
delivered unto me of my Father ; and no man knoweth the 
son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save 
the son, and he to whomsoever the son will reveal Him." These 
words have been supposed to indicate the belief that he enjoyed 
as his exclusive privilege a knowledge of divine things, in 
consequence of the peculiar relation in which he stood to God. 
And they bear such a close resemblance to the general tone of 
discourse attributed to Jesus in the fourth Gospel, that they 
are commonly cited to prove that even the synoptists have 
preserved a specimen of the use by Jesus of a style of self- 
assertion quite different from anything which is elsewhere 
ascribed to him by them, but eminently characteristic 
of the discourses ascribed to him by the fourth evangelist. 
And this solitary, or all but solitary, instance of the kind is 
supposed to prove the genuineness of the Johannine tradition, 
in spite of its apparent discordance with the synoptic. But to 
us it has always seemed as if this fact pointed to quite the 
opposite conclusion, and tended rather to throw suspicion on 
the genuineness of this portion of the synoptic record. The 
teaching of Jesus as preserved in this record we regard as the 
most important and authentic portion of the narrative ; and 
we do not rashly or willingly call any part of it in question. 
But we must confess that the close resemblance of the above 
passage to the general tone and spirit of the fourth Gospel, 
together with the contrast which it presents to the rest of the 
synoptic discourses, and its isolated position in these, seems to 
warrant some suspicion as to its authenticity. 

At the same time we admit that, while the words under 
consideration (Matth. xi. 27) are appropriate to the idealized 
or dogmatic Christ, something like them may have been uttered 
by the historical Jesus. He might say that no man but he, the 
son, knew the Father, because he was conscious that he alone, 
of all living men, was possessed of the true conception of the 
divine character and of the true ideal of humanity. He knew 
enough of contemporary Judaism and heathenism to be satisfied 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 69 

of this ; and much as he may have been indebted to the ancient 
lawgivers and prophets of his people, profoundly versed as he 
was in their writings, yet he knew that his own insight into 
divine things went far beyond theirs. In virtue of such a 
consciousness he could say that he had come to fulfil the law 
and the prophets ; and we shall yet see how much turned on 
this consciousness of his own higher insight ; how, in fact, it 
underlay his whole ministry ; and how it is conceivable that he 
may, in some form of words, have claimed an exclusive or 
unique knowledge of the Heavenly Father, and have laid stress 
upon the fact. However great the obligation under which he 
lay to the prophetic line, he may yet have been fully conscious 
of the presence of those new elements in his teaching which 
harmonized, unified, and sublimated all that he owed to his 
prophetic predecessors ; and these were elements for which he 
could most readily account as in some sense a revelation of 
God to his soul : as, indeed, all truth may be regarded in that 
light. They existed for him, not as mere intellectual notions, 
but as certitudes which formed the very base of his spiritual 
life, so that he felt himself to be at one with God. The gulf 
between the finite and the infinite seemed for him to be so 
bridged that he could regard himself as in some mystical sense 
a son of God as well as a son of man. But we cannot rest 
here : perfect candour requires that we go a step further, and 
say, that if Jesus claimed a special and supernatural derivation 
for any part of his doctrine, we cannot, in that case, feel 
constrained, even by the deepest reverence which we entertain 
for his person, to accept of such a claim on his authority. We 
could only regard it as one proof among others that even in 
the province of religion, or bordering on it, he partook of that 
fallibility of judgment which is common to man ; or, let us say, 
of that tendency common to the age, as well as to much more 
recent times, to refer to a supernatural origin facts, whether of 
consciousness or of observation, which we cannot understand or 
explain. 

It was an instance of fallibility, analogous to that which he 
betrays to the inquiring modern spirit, in his unquestioning 
belief in diabolic possession, in the verbal inspiration of Old 
Testament scriptures, if not also in the certainty of his own 
second coming, all remnants of Jewish ideas by which his 
mind was dominated, showing clearly that he was not free 



JO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

from error even in the province of religion, and too seriously 
enunciated by him to admit of being explained away as mere 
accommodation on his part to Jewish modes of thinking. 

If we examine his teaching we shall find that even in his 
most emphatic utterances Jesus appealed to the reason and 
conscience and to the spiritual instincts of his audience. He 
demands belief, not because he says a thing, but he says it 
and expects it to make an impression on men's minds, and 
to gain their assent, because it carries in it its own authority; 
because it awakens a secret consciousness of its truth in those 
whom he addresses ; because it only needed to be uttered to 
obtain the assent of honest hearts open to conviction. He 
does not enforce the belief of his doctrine by declaring it to 
be the word of God, but he leaves it to be inferred that it is 
the word of God, because it appeals to the conscience. 
Nothing can be more evident to those who enter carefully 
into the spirit of his teaching, than that for him the nature 
of man was, in modern phraseology, autonomous, that all 
duty was regarded by him as enjoined in the first place by 
our own highest nature, and only secondarily considered as 
having the sanction of God, because He is the author of our 
constitution. 

In this respect he differed widely from the prophets of 
former ages, inasmuch as they — satisfied that the truth which 
appealed to their souls had come to them as a communication 
from without, from another spirit distinct from their own, 
which seemed to come upon them by sudden and inter- 
mittent illapse (see Jerem. xiv. 8) — sought for the most 
part # to impose it on the minds of others, as by an ex- 

* We say here " for the most part," because all through the Old Testa- 
ment the words of inspiration often take the form of an appeal to our 
rational nature. In the Psalms (xciv.-xcvi.) and in the Prophets generally 
(Isa. xliv.) there are splendid instances of this description. It is one of 
many instances of his bias in favour of Greek thought when Dr. Hatch, 
p. 158, says that in contrast with Greek ethics the earliest Christianity 
"rested morality on a divine command." The fact that Jesus, at the 
bidding of his own nature, dared in certain cases to set aside the 
statute, is a practical proof that he at least did not do so, and when St. 
Paul says that the Gentiles are a law to themselves, it is an implicit 
proof that he did not do so either. Whatever, in the popular language 
of the New Testament, may seem to say the contrary, the thought that 
morality has its foundation in human nature is deeply imbedded in 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 7 I 

traneous authority not resident in the truth itself. Whereas 
Jesus, from the circumstance that he enjoyed the calm, un- 
intoxicating, unecstatical, uninterrupted possession of the truth 
of God, and felt that the revealing spirit " abode " with him, 
recognised it as his own spirit, as a spirit which belonged 
to him as man, and in common with other men. 

We remark the resulting difference between the teaching 
of Jesus and that of the ancient prophets in the absence 
from the former of all those formulas which occur with 
ceaseless iteration in the latter, and were the prophetic way 
of clothing with divine authority the voice of the oracle 
within themselves. The appeal of Jesus passes between his 
own higher nature and that of those whom he addresses, 
and the " authority " with which he was felt by the multitudes 
to speak, was derived from the inward assent and testimony 
of their own consciences (Matth. vii. 29). It was the "answer" 
of the conscience which clothed his word of wisdom with 
authority, just as the answering faith of the listening crowds 
often invested his word of command with healing virtue. Its 
power of calling forth this response was the marvel of it in 
either case. The truths which were invested with this authority, 
which had this power of commending themselves, may be 
regarded as elements of natural religion, which ordinary men 
might appreciate and recognise the force of, though only 
the religious genius might be able to excogitate and discover 
them. Of such elements it was that the doctrine of Jesus 
specially consisted ; of truths which appealed to the moral 
and religious instincts of men : of some such especially as 
were at variance with the current notions of the time ; of 
such it was that he constructed a religious system sufficient 
to satisfy the spiritual wants and religious yearnings of men, 
to make a profound and permanent impression on the con- 
duct of those who embraced it, and to promote their ascent 
to an ever higher level of the religious life. We say nothing 
here of the weight imparted to his doctrine by the seal of 
truth which was impressed upon it by the manner of his 
life and death, for of this we shall elsewhere have occasion 
to speak. # 

Christianity, and shows itself especially, if indirectly and collaterally, in 
St. Paul's polemic against the obligation of the statutory law of Israel. 
*That the authority and impressiveness with which he spoke may have 



72 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

According to our view, Christianity as a specific form of 
religion took its rise, as we have already said, in the brood- 
ing, meditative mind of Jesus. His mind was the laboratory 
in which his inherited Judaism was liberated from certain 
elements of error and imperfection, and entered into com- 
bination with new elements supplied by his depth of insight 
into the nature of the religious principle, or of the relation 
subsisting between God and His rational offspring. In him 
singular reverence for the past and its wisdom was combined 
with absolute independence of judgment. Not at all infected 
with the presumptuous and immodest desire to dissent from 
pre-existing beliefs merely because they were established in 
the minds of the community, his was yet no merely recep- 
tive and passive, and still less a yielding nature, easily " sub- 
dued to the moral element " in which he lived ; but resting 
on a basis of its own, enabling him to withstand and vanquish 
ideas and tendencies which shocked or did not recommend 
themselves to his religious instincts. His prepossessions were 
all in favour of time-honoured beliefs, inherited from the 
fathers. These beliefs were among the conditions which 
helped to make him what he was, and of these he retained 
to the last his regard for not a few which do not admit of 
being verified, and which we now look upon as mere Jewish 
superstitions or " extra-beliefs." 

been aided by the tone of his voice and his novel and awe-inspiring 
modes of speech, seems to be a legitimate inference from his habitual 
use of the Amen (verily) with which he prefaced his more emphatic 
utterances. The word was expressive of that certitude and depth of con- 
viction which, when it reveals itself on the part of a speaker, is wont to 
have an imposing and subduing effect on the hearer. But it was not 
merely expressive of his own deep conviction, it was also a call to his 
hearers to regard the assent which they gave to his teaching as an absolute 
authority over their conduct. As if he had said, "You feel the truth of 
what I am now speaking, hold to it then in all earnestness." He thus 
encouraged the rising of the higher moral sense within them. He used 
the word to show that he appealed to that as the authority within them- 
selves for the truth of his doctrine. According to the synoptists he used 
the word singly, whereas the fourth Evangelist makes him use it in a 
duplicated form. This is a minor difference between the synoptic Gospels 
and the fourth. But it is deserving of notice because it confirms the 
general observation, to be afterwards illustrated, that the fourth Evan- 
gelist sought to outdo and to go beyond the synoptists in their delineation 
of the life and teaching of Jesus. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 71 

The historical conditions amid which he appeared do not 
adequately explain how he became the teacher of a better form 
of religion than that in which he had been educated, and how 
he created a new epoch in the history of religion. These 
conditions were substantially the same, so far as we can discern, 
for multitudes of his contemporaries ; but he alone of all these 
multitudes showed any fitness for this enterprise. The fact 
can only be explained logically by falling back on the hypo- 
thesis that he was a great religious genius, or by crediting him 
with a great personal endowment and native force of character. 
Of no man in history could it less be said than of him, that he 
was the creature of his age ; and as little could it be said of 
that period of time that it would have been much the same, 
and have formed a turning point in religious history, had he 
not appeared. The course of the world's history did indeed 
flow on in the same direction as before for several centuries ; 
the change which he effected was confined to the small, 
obscure, but ever extending circle of those who yielded to 
his influence, and may all therefore be traced back to him 
as its fount of origin. Indeed, the rise of Christianity is 
a crucial instance to prove the theory that the advance 
of humanity along its many lines is due to the appearance 
from time to time of supremely gifted individuals : to the 
truths which they bring to light ; to the infection of their 
example ; or to the loyalty, veneration, and sympathy, which 
they rouse in the great masses of mankind. A general pro- 
gressive illumination, unmarked by any salient or original 
discovery, may proceed from the explication or better under- 
standing of some great principle previously divulged ; and 
results may flow, or deductions be drawn, which were not at 
first seen to be involved in it. But there have been great 
crises in human history and great revolutions in human life 
which have manifestly been due to the appearance of some 
towering genius, whom for a time his age could not understand 
and could but slowly overtake. Such, we believe, was pre- 
eminently the case with Jesus ; and we should have to say that 
it was true of him even if it were true of no other. That there 
are the greatest differences in the personal endowments of 
individuals, and that, even when to all appearance the con- 
ditions under which individuals grow up are the same, the 
resulting characters are very disparate, is what all must admit ; 



74 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

this fact is also so universal that we must regard it as due to 
the operation of general laws. 

It is to the operation of these same laws, and not to the 
action of any special providence, as the Duke of Argyll thinks, 
that we trace the rise and propagation of Christianity. If 
indeed we look merely to the deep and perhaps growing 
corruption of the ancient world, we may be tempted to regard 
the rise and rapid growth of Christianity as an abrupt and 
miraculous phenomenon in the world's history. The marvel is 
that a religion which inculcated a morality so severe should have 
had such a ready reception under such circumstances. But it 
should not be forgotten that, in historical fact, and by a sort of 
necessity, that corruption, such as it was, was accompanied by 
a growing consciousness of the prevailing evil and of the need 
of reformation ; and that this consciousness was in itself a 
preparation for the Gospel, or indeed for any religion which 
offered itself as a remedy for the evil. The higher life which 
revealed itself in Christianity was in reality a continuous devel- 
opment of that consciousness of evil which had grown up and 
become more pronounced in the Jewish and Gentile world. 
That consciousness was a manifestation of the good still latent, 
but struggling to assert itself in humanity. At the same time 
that consciousness, however acute, does not necessarily pass 
into a better life. It is often most acute in those who are 
unable to extricate themselves from the evil, and therefore 
continue still in their sin. A great step has yet to be taken 
by some strong son of man to react against the evil and to 
reach the level of a higher life. There is nothing improbable 
in the idea that an upward movement might begin in the mind 
of a single individual, whose consciousness of the evil was not 
only acute, but who by his depth of insight discerned the true 
and only remedy for it. And this was what actually took 
place in Christianity. Originating in the silent depths of the 
soul of Jesus, the great revolution in human life spread gradu- 
ally from him as its centre, taking effect upon a few receptive 
spirits through intercourse with him, and communicated by 
them to a larger circle. 

We can see that the question often discussed, Whether the 
moral condition of that age was or was not favourable to the 
rise of a pure religion ? is too general in its scope to be simply 
or categorically answered. It is conceivable that even the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 7 5 

exceptional immorality and superstition of an age might, by 
reason of their tendency to provoke reaction, be favourable to 
the introduction of a better time. If credit may be given to 
the Roman satirists and to the Christian apologists (who 
followed the lead of St. Paul, Rom. i.), we should say that the 
Gentile nations (not to speak in the meantime of the Jews) 
were in the state here supposed. But the views of such writers 
are almost certainly exaggerated, and call for many qualifica- 
tions, to which Dr. Hatch (Hibbert Lectures, 1888, p. 141) 
seeks to give expression. Adopting the conclusion to which a 
well-known German scholar has been led, he says : — " The age 
in which Christianity grew was in reality an age of moral 
reformation. There was the growth of a higher religious 
morality, which believed that God was pleased by moral action 
rather than by sacrifice. There was the growth of the belief 
that life required amendment. There was a reaction in the 
popular mind against the vices of the great centres of popula- 
tion," all preparing the minds of men to receive Christian teach- 
ing. Now, that there is a large measure of truth in this 
estimate of the age, we do not doubt ; yet we suspect that the 
reaction against the prevailing immorality and grossness of 
superstition was not very vigorous, or very widely diffused ; 
that it lay more in theory than in practice ; and that the belief 
in the necessity of amendment had no great influence upon the 
life. No doubt there were here and there individuals among 
the Stoics and Cynics of extraordinary virtue, standing out 
from the general level. But the signs of better things were 
confined in a measure to the schools and to the cultivated and 
literary classes. The great mass of the people, in the centres 
of population, seem to have been in a deplorable state of moral 
corruption ; and it is a notable fact, which, as is well known, 
has put its mark on the language of Rome, that it was just in 
these centres that Christianity gained its earliest and greatest 
triumphs. The " fulness of the time " at which Jesus came 
was due, we suspect, to the widely felt decay of faith and virtue, 
and to the proved failure and hopelessness of all attempts at 
self-reformation ; and it was only through some secret of power 
peculiar to the gospel that any great and general progress in 
morality was brought to pass. What that secret was may 
perhaps be made to appear in the following pages. 

Of the circumstances and more intimate surroundings of the 



y 6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

life of Jesus, up to his thirty-third or thirty-fifth year, we know 
absolutely nothing ; and we may surmise that all before that 
was a period of much self-discipline, of self-questioning, and of 
meditation on religious problems. We may suppose that the 
religious society into which he was born, and the religious views 
in which he had been educated, did not satisfy his religious 
instincts ; that he yearned for something better ; and that in 
his quest for that he passed through some great spiritual crisis, 
some unique religious experience, of which his teaching was 
the mere exponent. The length of time which he spent in 
obscurity, on which the tradition throws no light and which 
furnished no augury to his parents or brethren of his future 
career, suggests the idea that he may have risen slowly to become 
what he was when he made his appearance on the stage of 
public life ; and that it was a probationary or disciplinary 
period of prolonged mental conflict and suffering and self- 
struggle. 

To this view it has been objected, that such mental struggles 
leave scars in the life, tokens of past conflict and suffering : 
indications of a personal acquaintance with sin ; reminiscences 
of painful experiences of frailty and of division in the members, 
to which St. Paul confesses ; the ground-swell of a storm that 
is past ; of all which Jesus exhibits no trace. But in his case 
all such indications may have vanished, because his victory 
was complete, his doubts solved, and his resolution irrevocably 
taken before he showed himself to the world. 

That Jesus took little or no interest in merely speculative 
or abstract truth is very apparent. He did not trouble himself 
to find any dogmatic or philosophical basis for what was new 
in his doctrine ; and we may venture to say that he was the 
least speculative of all the great teachers of whom history has 
preserved a record. To be satisfied of this, we have only to 
compare him with Buddha, Zoroaster, or even with Confucius 
and other great men who figure in the history of religion. But 
perhaps there is no better proof of the absence from his mind 
of this speculative bent than the fact that he does not seem to 
have had any theory or opinion as to the origin of evil — the 
problem which, above all others, has exercised a fascination 
upon all great speculative thinkers. At least he made no use 
of any such theory, as Paul did afterwards ; and not a single 
utterance of his can be cited to show that he considered men to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. JJ 

have lost a faculty or power which they ever possessed. He 
was satisfied to accept of evil as a great and patent fact or 
phenomenon of human life ; and his primary object was to 
show men by his teaching and conduct how moral evil might 
be eliminated from the lives of individuals by a hard and 
continuous struggle against adverse influences and conditions 
outward and inward. His whole teaching gathered round this 
point and bore exclusively on practice : in one word, his was a 
soteriological doctrine, explanatory of the method by which 
men might deliver themselves from the evil around and within 
them, and rise to the level of a better life, and approach the 
ideal of humanity. It was with men individually that he dealt, 
for he saw distinctly that before his doctrine could take effect 
on society, or on the world at large, or, let us say, on the 
Jewish people, it had first to take effect on the individuals 
composing it. His prefatory announcement, indeed, respecting 
the kingdom of God, suffices to prove that he sought to enlist 
individuals in a cause, which is much greater than any mere 
personal aim ; and his parables show that he did not overlook 
the reflex effect of the transformed society on individuals ; but 
it is with the effect of his doctrine on these latter that we have 
chiefly to do, in considering the genesis of his religion. The 
method of self-denial and self-devotion, which he inculcated, 
was one, we may be confident, which he had first proved and 
practised for himself, and then offered as a guide and help to 
his disciples, because he had found it to be the only method 
by which he or any man could attain to the higher levels of the 
religious life, and to that inner harmony in which true blessed- 
ness consists. He had seen that whatever else might be 
doubtful or obscure, that was the true method of life, the 
present duty of men, laid down to them by the very constitu- 
tion of their nature ; that by which alone the possibilities 
within them might be developed, and the prophecy of better 
things fulfilled. 

That there was no metaphysical element in the doctrine of 
Jesus is affirmed by E. von Hartmann, whose authority on such 
a point we may accept. And if he be right in defining the 
religious man as one who forms his life upon some meta- 
physical basis, we should be driven to the conclusion that the 
title of Jesus to be regarded as a great religious teacher rests 
upon a very slender foundation. Indeed, E. von Hartmann 



7 8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

seems to think that by his remark, that Jesus never reflected 
on the immanence and transcendency of God, he has demol- 
ished the significance of the doctrine of Jesus for the present 
age. It would have been nearer the mark and more relevant, 
perhaps, had he said, what is probably true, that Jesus believed 
in the Old Testament miracles, or even in the miraculous 
nature of his own works of healing (though this latter is not 
quite so certain). But to all such observations the reply is, 
that the soteriological doctrine of Jesus stands on independent 
ground ; that it is but a statement of his personal experience, 
on which he does not theorize or speculate ; and that the 
unspeculative, unmetaphysical character of his doctrine is, 
negatively, that feature which has given to it its permanent 
hold of the human mind. The method which he propounded 
for the salvation, or the true education of man, is valid for all 
time, no matter whether the metaphysical relation of God to 
man and to the universe be (or be regarded as) that of trans- 
cendency or immanency or of both combined. In any and 
in every case man must, as we shall find that Jesus taught, 
maintain a struggle with himself in order to rise toward his 
ideal, and derive courage to persevere from faith in the propi- 
tious nature of the divine order. In all ages, too, the adequacy 
and necessity of this method will be verified in the spiritual 
experience of those who seriously put it in practice. In this 
method there is no mystery : " all is plain to him that under- 
standeth." The mystery, which will always remain insoluble, 
is that depth of insight and of moral conviction, that strength 
of independent will and judgment which enabled Jesus to set 
aside the accredited teachers and highest authorities of his 
people, resting, as they apparently and by general confession 
did, upon the inspired records and traditions of the revered 
past. But this is a mystery of the same kind as that which 
resides in all development and growth. 

We may here turn aside for a moment to say that many of 
us view, with not ungrounded jealousy, the claim of metaphysics 
and speculative philosophy to be the arbiters in religious or 
theological questions. It appears to be a sufficient reason for 
such jealousy, if there were no other, that speculative thinkers 
have not yet settled among themselves, and are not likely soon 
to settle, by their methods, what is absolute truth. That is 
true of metaphysical reasoning what Newman seems to say of 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 79 

science, that " its hypotheses rise and fall, and it is difficult to 
anticipate which of them will keep their ground." Yet in the 
face of this obvious reflection, we have seen in our own time 
curious attempts made by professedly orthodox theologians to 
effect a compromising alliance between speculative theories and 
the practical doctrines of Christianity ; and not the least strange 
thing of all in this reference is to find that the same theologian 
from whom we have just quoted has himself indulged in the 
same doubtful game. In his Apologia Newman tells us, without 
apology, or, so far as we know, recantation, that in one of his 
writings he " attempted to place the doctrine of the Real Pre- 
sence on an intellectual basis — viz., the denial of the existence 
of space, except as a subjective idea of our minds." Could a 
better example be well given of the desperate shifts to which 
men will resort in defence of a foregone conclusion ? In the 
treatment of theological questions the speculative thought of 
past ages no doubt plays, and rightfully plays, an important 
part. The history of philosophy is a great storehouse for the 
elucidation of Christian dogma ; but no system of philosophy 
can lay claim to finality, and we cannot venture to shape our 
religious opinions by any current system. Eventually theology 
and philosophy may flow together, but meanwhile they must 
hold on their independent courses. With science, or the know- 
ledge of the phenomenal, the case is somewhat different. For 
in a certain sense science, strictly so called, can lay claim to 
finality. For " science moves but slowly, slowly, creeping on 
from point to point," and never recedes from a point once 
gained. Year by year, century by century, it arrives at well- 
ascertained results, which can never be overturned or set aside ; 
and the grand general result is that the universe is governed 
on constitutional principles, by inflexible and unvarying laws, 
to which Creator and creature are alike subject. Every sphere 
into which the torch of science has been carried has yielded 
confirmation to this result, and it may confidently be predicted 
that every further advance of science will do the like. The 
presumption that there is no exception to the reign of law in 
any department of mind or matter is so overwhelming, that if 
the truth of Christianity were bound up with the reality in it of 
a miraculous element, it would stand on most precarious ground. 
We may dismiss at once every form of religious belief which is 
at variance with a single well-ascertained scientific fact. For 



80 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

in this age we have got beyond the stage of thought at which 
it is possible to believe that what is false either in philosophy 
or in science may be true in theology. 

Further on, when we come to consider more particularly the 
teaching of Jesus, it will fall to us to show that a dogmatic or 
unverifiable element is entirely absent from his doctrine ; but in 
the meantime we would simply observe that the implicit re- 
cognition in his teaching of human autonomy, together with 
the absence of dogmatic elements, is as much as to say that his 
method of deliverance from evil is autosoteric — in plain terms, 
a process of self-elevation, or of self-extrication, or of self- 
redemption from evil — a process which can be carried out only 
by that struggle of man himself with his own lower nature, of 
which the cross is the symbol. Recognizing in himself, and in 
mankind generally, the presence of a higher nature in germ 
akin to the divine, or, as we should say, of an ideal nature 
representative of, or in subtle organic sympathy with, that uni- 
versal order which is one with the will of God ; of a principle, 
therefore, to which as being common to man he could appeal ; 
he could not but also recognize the obligation lying upon him- 
self and upon all men, to acquire for it the preponderance over 
the lower nature, of which he was also conscious. The obliga- 
tion was involved in the very existence of that ideal principle, 
and the consciousness of that obligation also involved or was 
presumptive of the possibility of its fulfilment. He had found, 
no doubt, by experience that that preponderance of the good 
over the evil, and the gradual extinction of the latter, could 
only be secured by an earnest struggle ; and this fact, which 
had disclosed itself to his consciousness as a necessary law of 
human life was the centre round which were grouped all the 
elements of his teaching, whether theological or anthropological. 
And yet further, this same fact furnished him with the sole test 
which he could apply to the current popular beliefs. He ques- 
tioned no inherited belief which did not come into collision with 
that. He did not seek to interfere with such, except in so far 
as they jarred with convictions which were drawn from experi- 
ence, and were therefore more valid than tradition, and not to 
be surrendered at the bidding of any authority, however sacred 
or revered. Current ideas were suffered by him to stand side 
by side with these convictions, and were left there unsuspect- 
ingly until a time should arrive when the latter should cast 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 8 I 

those forth, and show their own right of survival by their 
capacity of entering into harmonious combination with the new 
theory or system of thought, by which the naive or traditional 
theory was superseded. It may even be that his reverence for 
the ancient belief was so great, or his interest in his method so 
absorbing, as to keep in abeyance even that tendency or craving 
for inward unity of thought which is so congenial to the human 
mind, and also to prevent him from venturing upon ground 
where the facts of his consciousness did not form a certain 
guide. 

That human consciousness may thus assert itself, and be 
the guarantee of facts or laws which lie beyond the area of 
traditional beliefs, that it may even form the nucleus or in- 
ception of a new synthesis of thought, is what is meant 
when we speak of the pioneering office of genius. What we 
say is, that the distinctive doctrine of Jesus rested on facts 
of his consciousness, and was therefore independent of any 
recognized theory ; but like every doctrine resting on fact, 
and giving a true reflection of fact, it was capable of entering 
into combination with and finding a place for itself in the 
true theory of the universe, whatever that might prove to be. 
This is our reply to the assertion, which has been made by 
Von Hartmann and others, that we moderns can no longer 
honestly claim to be Christians since we have adopted a 
theory of the universe, a scheme of divine government different 
from that of which the doctrine of Jesus was an outgrowth. 
We meet this assertion by simply denying that the distinctive 
doctrines of Jesus, which are the central principles of Christ- 
ianity, were an outgrowth or appendage of any theory of the 
universe, or can, with any propriety, be said to stand or fall 
with any such. We hope that this will appear more distinctly 
further on, when we have determined wherein the specific 
doctrine of Jesus consists. 

As a mere statement of facts of consciousness, as it abode 
in the mind of Jesus, his doctrine was independent of any 
theory. Had the religious process as inculcated by Jesus 
been heterosoteric (i.e. carried on by help from outside), as 
it afterwards became in the hands of St. Paul and the early 
Church, the assertion made by Von Hartmann and others 
would have been valid ; for in the hands of St. Paul the religious 
consciousness, as articulated by Jesus, adapted and allied it- 

¥ 



82 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

self to the existing or accepted theory of the universe, and 
just because it did so, was fitted to exert the greater influence 
upon the mind of that and many succeeding ages ; but for 
the same reason, i.e. just because it is allied and conformed 
to an exploded theory of the universe, it is now, in that form, 
losing its hold of the human mind and falling into discredit. 
Whereas the method of Jesus, in its purely autosoteric and 
undogmatic form, will survive under every revolution of human 
thought, and will compel the world to own itself Christian, 
because that name is derived from him who was the first to 
become distinctly conscious of that experience and to impart 
it to the world. 

With these general and preliminary remarks on the 
function of Jesus as a teacher, we proceed now to observe 
that as (with a qualification to be afterwards made) he did 
not profess to be more than a teacher, so he did not 
profess to teach an absolutely new religion or to propose an 
absolutely new system of thought and conduct. He resembled 
most other, or, we may perhaps say, all other great founders 
of religion before and since in that he professed only to reform 
that religion in which he had himself been educated, and 
which was still believed in by those around him. To prevent 
an erroneous apprehension of his aims and purposes he said 
that he had come not to destroy but to fulfil the law, to fill 
it with a fuller and deeper meaning perhaps than even Moses 
himself or the prophets had found in it, or, we may say more 
generally, to bring into full light those views of religion which 
from early times had been struggling to find expression in 
Israel, views which had attained a very high form of ex- 
pression in prophetic ages, but had lost their vitality and 
become inert under the rule of the priestly and learned castes. 

His object was not so much to supersede the religion of 
Israel as to breathe a new life into it ; not merely to re- 
pristinate even the best thought of the past, but to restore it 
in a transfigured form, and to give heightened prominence to 
those very features of the religious idea which even the 
prophets had not been able to bring to full expression, and 
which had been all but forgotten and obscured by the com- 
mentators of later times. By the criticism which he applied 
to the records of preceding ages, and by his comparison of 
them with the ideas and usages prevalent in his own day, he 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 83 

was able to discern the deep significance of those very elements 
of prophetic teaching from which his contemporaries had fallen 
away, and to perceive the necessity of placing these elements 
in higher relief and making them more distinctive of his teach- 
ing. It is not improbable that the advance of evangelic 
doctrine beyond the prophetic standpoint could not have been 
made even by him but for the lesson which the intervening 
and non-prophetic ages conveyed to his penetrating eye. 
That he drew the lesson was an act of highest genius and 
insight, and was what entitled him to say that he came to 
fulfil the law and the prophets. 

By this time it will appear, and it will appear more and 
more as we proceed, that we regard what are usually styled the 
central facts of Christianity, such as the incarnation and the 
resurrection of Jesus, not as facts at all, but only as quasi- 
historical, or mythical forms, in which Christian phantasy 
clothed the facts of Christian experience. For us, Jesus is the 
Founder of our faith, because he was the discoverer of the true 
relation between God and man, the originator of that organic 
environment, of that web of thought, of habit, and of asso- 
ciation into which we are born, and which forms the starting 
point of the spiritual life of individuals within the Christian 
community. It will also be seen that though the alleged facts 
disappear under the sober, searching scrutiny of criticism and 
science, Christianity itself does not disappear or perish : 
inasmuch as the experience in which it consists still survives, 
and the specific consciousness which constitutes its essential 
principle is established in the system of human thought, and 
repeats itself from generation to generation, and operates to 
this day as the most powerful factor in the spiritual and social 
life of man. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE GROWTH IN ISRAEL OF THE IDEA, 
" KINGDOM OF GOD." 

JESUS entered upon his reforming activity by announcing that 
the kingdom of heaven was at hand, an announcement which, 
though it was prefatory to his teaching, must have been 
preceded in his mind by the discovery of the inwardness and 
blessedness of true righteousness, which, as we shall yet see, 
was the staple of his doctrine. In logical sequence, his view of 
the kingdom of God was derivative, an inference from his view 
as to the righteousness of God. But for convenience of 
arrangement we shall, at the risk of anticipating some of our 
remarks on the latter subject, first explain his views as to the 
former. 

An announcement identical in terms had already been made 
by John the Baptist ; but without adverting in the meantime 
to the significance of this fact, we proceed to say that by this 
announcement Jesus gave it at once to be understood by his 
audiences that between his doctrine and that which was current 
among them — that with which they were familiar — there was 
an unbroken continuity. The expectation of a divine kingdom 
which would realize the highest hopes of the people and 
remedy all the evils and disasters which had befallen the 
nation, had for many ages formed a great part of Jewish 
religion or Jewish faith ; and both the idea and the expression 
had long been current. We might, therefore, without inquiring 
further into the origin and nature of this singular direction of 
the Jewish mind, content ourselves with accepting it as a 
historical fact, as a unique variety of national sentiment which 
was of happy consequence for the spiritual and religious pro- 
gress, first, of the Jewish people, and then, through them, of 



NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 85 

the world at large. But this connecting link between the Old 
and New Testaments — between the Jewish and the Christian 
religions — is far too important to be dismissed with such a 
summary treatment. There is no better way of understanding 
or explaining the relation which Christianity occupies to Juda- 
ism, or of placing in high relief the novelty and originality of 
the doctrine of Jesus, than by tracing the rise and growth of 
this idea, and observing the transformation which it underwent 
in the thought of Jesus. Like all great and fully developed 
ideas, it had its roots in a far back time, and to trace its 
history is the best way of getting to the understanding of it. 
" The thought of the present," as has well been said, " cannot 
be understood without reference to that of the past. The 
former is shaped by the latter both in the way* of action and 
of reaction. What we think to-day is, to a very large extent, 
the result or deposit of what men have thought before us ; 
a heritage which we may scrutinize, test, and modify, or even 
reject or abandon, but of which we cannot rid ourselves, or treat 
as of no account." Nothing could be better expressed ; and it 
points out the method by which we may best approach the 
doctrine of the kingdom of God, as it assumed its final form 
in the teaching of Jesus. 

There can be no two opinions as to the fact that Christianity 
was deeply rooted in the religion of Israel — rooted in it far 
more deeply and intimately, because organically and spiritually, 
than in the somewhat mechanical way of which the super- 
natural theory gives the idea. To see that such is the case, 
we must go back to the commencement of the Jewish common- 
wealth, and trace the roots of Christianity, or, which is the 
same thing, the roots of the idea " Kingdom of God " which 
issued in Christianity, to that far distant time. Like every 
other religion, even the most rude and elementary, that of 
Israel had a certain capacity of higher development. In 
combination with its theistic idea, its ethical elements gave 
promise of a very high development. But the mythical idea 
of a covenant relation and of a national election, which was 
intrinsic to it, or which, at least, entered deeply into its struc- 
ture, and was the secret of its wonderful vitality, caused it, as 
we shall yet find, to settle down into the Judaistic form, and 
placed a limit to its capacity for a further advance. In the 
depths of their consciousness, the higher or prophetic minds of 



86 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the people were painfully aware that the " dispensation " under 
which they lived was essentially, if not hopelessly, imperfect ; 
and that another prophet, like unto Moses, was needed to lead 
the people forth into a new land, not of promise but of fulfil- 
ment They tried many times to burst through the limiting 
barrier, and sometimes seemed, as in the case of Jeremiah 
especially, to be on the point of succeeding ; but they were 
unequal to the task, and Jesus it was who, greater than all the 
prophets, burst the barrier, and set the religious idea free to 
expand into its absolute form. 

In order now to show the nature of his great achievement, 
the work by which he laid the foundation of his new religion, 
we must review the phases through which the religion of Israel 
passed, till it arrived at that stage in which it presented itself 
to him. Our remarks for this end, though they may seem to 
be somewhat protracted, will be found not to be irrelevant to 
the matter in hand; not to be a digression, but an integral part 
of our subject. The details into which we shall here enter do 
not profess to be exhaustive. For it is no part of our plan to 
pass in review the history of Israel, or its religious thought and 
usage, except in so far as these are supposed by us to lead up 
to the thought of Jesus, or to have provoked the reaction in his 
mind. We shall endeavour to show that the religion of Israel, 
which attained its zenith in the prophetic age, had, by the time 
of Jesus, gradually declined, and shrunk into a form which he 
found it necessary to denounce and to supplant. And in 
pursuance of this object, we shall leave unnoticed many topics 
in the religious history of Israel which in themselves are of 
interest, but for our purpose of only subsidiary or collateral 
importance. 

Many facts which have been brought to light in recent times 
by the patient study of the monuments of ancient Egypt and 
Assyria, leave little or no doubt that in the Book of Genesis 
there are many allusions to personages and events of pre- 
Mosaic times, which had lingered in the memory or literature 
of Eastern nations, and were woven by a very free hand into a 
consecutive narrative, so as to form a fitting introduction to the 
Exodus from Egypt — the event which, whether mythical or 
historical, real or imaginary, was the commencement spiritually 
of the Israelitish people. To make this introduction more 
complete and imposing, the writer or writers of the Book of 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 87 

Genesis traced up an imaginary history to the creation of the 
world and to the first parents of our race ; just as the 
Greeks invented links by which to claim a divine ancestry 
for their ruling dynasties : or just as genealogists in later 
times, for the glorification of certain families, have traced 
up their descent to the Norman Conquest, or to the be- 
ginnings of the modern era. Going back, therefore, to the 
Exodus as the commencement or starting point of the history 
of Israel, we have to remark that this great epoch-making 
event is wrapped in a deep obscurity, which cannot be dissi- 
pated even by the most critical study of the surviving monu- 
ments and records. It was probably an event without a 
parallel, or otherwise unheard of, in which a mixed multitude 
(Exod. xii. 38 ; Numb. xi. 4) was fused into a nation, born in 
a day (Isaiah lxvi. 8) ; or it was a crisis in what was already a 
national life, which left an ineffaceable stamp upon the char- 
acter and history of the Israelitish race. We may readily 
believe that the shores of the Red Sea were on that occasion 
the scene of incidents of a very unusual character, such as are 
sometimes spoken of as a special providence. But of one thing 
we may be perfectly certain, viz. that great, surprising, and 
eventful as these incidents may have been, they were not of 
that preternatural character which the Pentateuch ascribes to 
them. The principle, or hypothesis, on which we conduct this 
whole inquiry, is that nothing miraculous has ever occurred, 
whether in the secular or in the religious history of mankind. 
It may be that the fugitive and alarmed people did not, at the 
very time of the Exodus, understand the actual sequence of 
the events in which they took part, and may have seen in them 
the indication of an immediate divine interposition in their 
behalf. But more probably it was the poetical, mythical, and 
pragmatizing phantasy of succeeding generations which exalted 
the accompanying circumstances into the region of the marvel- 
lous. Unconsciously the fancy may have been stimulated by 
the desire to supply the place of actual knowledge, to gratify 
national vanity, to ennoble and render interesting events 
connected with the first appearance of Israel as a distinct 
people — events which may have been very commonplace in 
reality, or even humiliating, as one very ancient author # repre- 
sents them to have been. Or, again, the mythicizing phantasy 

* Manetho, 300 B.C. 



88 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

may have been stimulated by the political intention of strength- 
ening the bond of intertribal and national unity ; or yet more 
than all, by the felt necessity of supplying a historical founda- 
tion for that belief of a peculiar relation to God which had 
grown up of itself in the nation, and of which men of prophetic 
minds discerned the importance. The few facts which lingered 
in the memory of the people were so moulded by popular 
fancy as to convey the idea that a divine power had interfered 
to rescue them from an alien and oppressive domination ; an 
idea which naturally, or rather necessarily, involved the associ- 
ated idea that God had chosen them out of all the nations of 
the earth, and adopted them as a peculiar people, whom he 
meant, and, ipso facto, engaged to befriend above all others for 
the time to come. This was an idea which might easily take 
root in the popular mind of Israel. 

Of every youthful nation it has been said that it secretly 
cherishes the hope of being the chosen one to occupy the first 
place among the kingdoms of the future ; and we may suppose 
that the marvellous circumstances of the Exodus, in which the 
finger of God was seen, may have caused the springing up 
among the people of a hope of this kind, not secretly cherished 
but universally diffused and openly avowed, so as powerfully to 
influence the national fortunes. It was an idea too which, 
from the combination in it of political and religious elements, 
was calculated to take a deep and tenacious hold of the mind, 
and to awaken an enthusiasm very different from the languid 
feeling which is all that a purely spiritual or religious idea 
usually excites. 

A distinguished critic (Ewald) has said with characteristic 
dogmatism that " there are no myths in the Bible, the mythical 
element being heathenish or of heathenish tendency." This 
dictum implies that there are no heathenish elements in the 
Bible, a position of a very disputable character, except for 
those who hold a theory of its inspiration more strict at least 
than that of its being " the literature of a divinely instructed 
people." At the present day it is impossible to pretend that 
the records of the Old Testament are purely historical, or that 
a mythical element is altogether absent. Recent archaeological 
discoveries have demonstrated that some traditions, as e.g. those 
of the cosmogony and the flood, were originally common to 
Israel and other Semitic nations ; and the high probability is, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 89 

that the transformation which these have undergone in the Old 
Testament was due to the ethical genius which developed itself 
in Israel. Other traditions, which were of purely Israelitish 
origin, such as those connected with the Exodus and with 
later events in Israelitish history, were probably the creation of 
the people at large, recast by men of cultivated and prophetic 
mind into a new form, stripped of whatever heathenish elements 
they contained, and made the vehicle of the more advanced 
moral and religious views, which had grown up in later times, 
so as to recommend them to the more backward and con- 
servative classes. It is absurd to deny, in whatever sense, the 
mythical character of the obviously unhistorical or preternatural 
element of the records, merely because that element is shaped 
so as to promote the moral and religious education of the 
people. 

In the sequel we shall have much to say respecting the 
mythical process, but at this point we shall confine ourselves 
to the observation that this process was an accompaniment, 
not occasional only or adventitious, but under certain con- 
ditions constant and inseparable, of the course of religious 
development in Israel. That a mythical handling of history — 
the charging it with elements of a supernatural and abnormal 
character — was not an accidental or occasional literary exercise, 
but permanent and inevitable under the circumstances of a people, 
bent, as the Israelites were, on regarding their history as a 
record of very special providences, — this is what we assert. 
Even at the present day of scientific enlightenment, men of 
highly cultivated minds, such as the Duke of Argyll, while sen- 
sible that things in general are governed according to strict law 
and fixed order, yet explain the progress of civilization, and the 
persistence of grand religious movements under apparently un- 
toward conditions, by the hypothesis that the divine power 
secretly impresses, when needed, a favourable direction upon 
human affairs, by calling laws into operation which are beyond 
the knowledge and the use of finite intelligence, or by what has 
been called " directionism." The fact of such complementary, 
or epicyclical divine action, can, of course, not be demonstrated ; 
because, confessedly, nothing ever happens in open or percept- 
ible contravention of the common law of the universe. But the 
reality of such action, as a permanent factor of human life, is 
taken simply on trust by faith. Is it, then, improbable that in 



90 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

ancient Israel, when men had little or no idea of the uniform 
action of law, or laid little stress upon it, they should fly to the 
idea of divine intervention to explain all very uncommon, in- 
scrutable occurrences, or marvellous turns in their national 
history — an intervention not exerted secretly, so as to elude 
sense and demonstration, but openly and palpably in the form 
of abrupt and manifest miracle? The feeling or sentiment at 
work to suggest this idea was the same then as it is now — the 
feeling that God will interfere occasionally to keep the course of 
history upon the line of the divine purpose, which would other- 
wise suffer shipwreck ; to prevent hardships and injustices which 
would be inflicted under the rigorous and untempered sway of 
any law, however beneficent in its general operation — the feel- 
ing, in short, that summum jus may become summa injuria. 
And this feeling, we say, must have worked in Israel without 
intermission from generation to generation, so as to put its 
impress everywhere upon the records of their history. It should 
also be remembered that the miraculous narratives of the sacred 
books, though they were no doubt literally understood by the 
masses of the people, especially as time went on, may not have 
been seriously meant by .the authors. The narratives may, in 
many cases, have been allegorical, concrete, or poetic represent- 
ations either of spiritual experiences in the inner life of indi- 
viduals, or of that secret action of the Supreme Power which 
the people of Israel believed to be constantly operating in their 
favour, and which the piously scientific imagination of such men 
as the Duke of Argyll believes to be statedly at work in human 
history. 

We do not wish to be understood as asserting that, at 
each period or conjuncture of the religious development 
in Israel, individuals were prompted to invest it with a 
supernatural character by way of explaining it. We conceive 
rather that at such periods religion became a great factor of 
thought, and that individuals who participated in the new 
religious experience and had risen, more or less consciously, 
to a higher stage of religious development, were prompted by 
the literary instinct to give expression to it " in psalms and 
hymns and spiritual songs." The Book of Psalms does but 
preserve the echoes of various ages and stages of development, 
and hence the diverse spirit which it breathes. But this was 
not all, for to such individuals their religious experience became 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 9 I 

the medium through which they viewed the present and the 
coming age, and they gave utterance to their view of both 
often in dithyrambic strains, whether of hope or of despair, 
as we find in the prophetic and apokalyptic books. And, 
finally, individuals were prompted by religious feeling to colour 
and revise in mythical dramatic form the traditions of the past, 
so as to make of these a vehicle of their thought and to find 
in them a prophecy or presentiment of the new ideas to which 
they had risen. It was thus that the devotional, prophetic, and 
historical literature of the Old Testament grew up ; the past, 
the present, and the future were drawn together, and a certain 
analogy of faith was preserved in its pages. To the higher 
minds of Israel who held the common belief that the nation 
had been elect of God from its cradle it could not but appear 
to be a strange and perplexing fact, so far as this was per- 
ceived, that during the course of its history it had passed 
through many stages of ethical and religious development — 
from polytheistic to monotheistic worship — and had ascended 
from a very low to a comparatively high level of the religious 
life. And, to throw over this fact a thick but (as it has 
proved) not an impenetrable veil ; to make the earlier stages 
an anticipation of the later ; to efface the differences between 
them, and to help on the development, was the unconscious 
motive of the mythicizing process to which the records were 
subjected. This is the way that we account, for example, for 
the promises said to have been made to the fathers of the 
race, of which St. Paul long after made such account. 

Old Testament history gives itself out for the history of an 
hundred generations. But we cannot suppose that it is merely 
a catena or an abbreviated summary of the myths that had 
survived of these ages. Legends there may have been, and 
no doubt were, of very ancient date which had undergone 
gradual changes as they passed from mouth to mouth. But 
in their extant or canonical revision, these myths, we conceive, 
were largely the work of a prophetic band, and were intended, 
more or less consciously, to conduce, under the attractive form 
and sanction of history, to moral instruction, to stir the re- 
ligious pulse of the national life, and to be the means of 
popularizing the purer ideas which had dawned upon the 
higher minds of the people. 

On the former of the two hypotheses, in regard to which 



92 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

we said above that the preternatural character given to the 
Exodus might be accounted for, it is conceivable that the 
great leader of the people may have taken advantage of the 
emergency to promulgate, in the name of God, who was 
believed to have brought them out of the land of bondage 
with a high hand, the general principles or first outlines of 
that Code of Laws, moral and religious, civil and ceremonial, 
which was afterwards expanded by himself, and by a suc- 
cession of prophetic men imbued with his spirit, who spoke 
and wrote in his name. If it be a fact, as there is no reason 
to doubt, that Moses was skilled in all the wisdom, esoteric 
and exoteric, of the Egyptians, there can be no difficulty in 
conjecturing the source from which he derived the code of 
rudimentary ethics which is laid down in the Decalogue. The 
scrolls and inscriptions which, in recent times, have been 
brought to light and deciphered, have demonstrated that long 
before the time of Moses the moral standard, theoretically at 
least, was very high in Egypt, as high indeed as that of the 
Decalogue. The great distinction of the Israelites — a very 
great one — was that their morality, even if it dated from their 
residence in Egypt, had the effect of soon refining and exalt- 
ing their religious ideas, as was never the case in Egypt itself, 
where, curiously and inexplicably enough, a debased form of 
popular religion retained its place side by side with a high 
development, in some quarters or classes, of the moral senti- 
ment. The great fame and reputation of the Hebrew legis- 
lator is sufficiently justified by the fact that he so clearly 
discerned the importance of ethical and religious principles as 
a means of giving stability to social organization ; that he took 
the highest results of the most ancient civilization which the 
world had seen, and laid them at the foundation of his nascent 
state ; that he snatched the torch of human progress from hands 
which could bear it no further, and passed it on to those of 
a fresh and youthful race — of a race which he may have 
freshened and rejuvenated by this very stroke of high policy. 
The literary and historic criticism, however, which has been 
brought to bear on this subject leaves little room to doubt, 
if it has not even demonstrated, that in its extant form the 
Mosaic law was the work of many men and many ages, being 
neither more nor less than a register of rites, observances, and 
ethical principles, which, as they became established in the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 93 

moral consciousness and in the usages of the people, were 
naturally referred back to Moses himself as the source of 
their authority. No matter how naturally or how derivatively 
these elements of religion and those patriotic sentiments which 
differentiated Israel from the surrounding peoples were evolved, 
we can easily conceive that in an uncritical age, which received 
without suspicion the idea of supernatural action, they might 
be universally regarded as due to a special revelation, and that 
the higher and prophetic minds of the nation, divining their 
value from a political and religious point of view, might 
employ themselves in framing and moulding the history of 
their forefathers on that hypothesis. These were men who 
believed firmly in the close, personal, and discriminating super- 
intendence by Jehovah of all human, but especially of all 
Israelitish affairs, and also in the law of retribution, which, 
founded in the nature of things and in the universal principles 
of the divine government, the mythical phantasy delights, ac- 
cording to its wont, to picture to itself as an arrangement 
come to between God and man at a certain conjuncture of 
human affairs. It was imagined, and said, that such an arrange- 
ment or understanding, to which the name of a covenant was 
given, had been come to between God and Israel on Mount 
Sinai, and that the law there given amid thunder and lightning, 
as recorded in the Book of Exodus, was the summary of its 
terms and conditions. 

The idea of retribution which could otherwise be expressed 
only in an abstract, and, to untutored minds, uninteresting, 
vague, and unintelligible form was thus touched with interest 
and translated into a form which was level and impressive. 
We may take it for granted that the idea of such a covenant 
binding both upon God and the people, and expressive of 
reciprocal obligations (even though the word may, as some 
critics maintain, be of late occurrence in Hebrew literature), 
must have existed in germ at least from the time that a 
distinctive law and the faith of a divine election became the 
spiritual possession of Israel. But it should be borne in mind 
that the covenant which was thus a creation of the mythical 
fancy would be felt to involve more than a legal compact 
between equals. In such a compact the arrangement is an- 
nulled if one of the contracting parties violates the conditions 
But the conception that God had entered into a covenant 



94 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 



with Israel alone of all the nations of the earth would be 
regarded as a proof of His distinguishing favour for the people, 
whom He had thus singled out, prior to and independent of 
their fidelity to the terms of the covenant ; of a purpose on 
His part to exalt the nation, which would not suffer itself to 
be defeated by any temporary aberrations and infidelities on 
the part of the people. Individuals or generations might on 
account of these suffer deprivation of the covenanted benefits, 
but the race would continue to be the object of divine favour, 
and if God should seem to withdraw His patronage for a 
time, He would visit the people again, renew His covenant 
with them, and restore them, as at the first He had adopted 
them, without merit or desert on their part, and grant them 
an unconditional amnesty for all past defections. Thus, it is 
said, "I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have 
driven thee, but I will not make a full end of thee " (Jer. xlvi. 
28); "I will return and have compassion on thee" (Jer. xii. 
15). And therefore it is that the covenant is so often spoken 
■of as " everlasting," as a covenant which might be broken on 
the part of the people, but would still be valid on the part of 
God (Isa. xxiv. 5 ; Deut. vii. 9 ; 2 Sam. xxiii. 5, vii. 14, 15 ; 
Ps. lxxxix. 30-34). This was a collateral view of the covenant 
which in times of national degeneracy and backsliding would 
rise into prominence and have very important bearing, by 
sustaining the hopes of the better remnant of the people, 
though, as we shall yet see, it might also have an evil and 
morally relaxing effect on the commonalty. 

Whether, now, this idea of a divine election and a covenant 
relation arose at the time of the Exodus, or was a subsequent 
creation of the mythicizing fancy, in either case it taught the 
people to count upon a high degree of national prosperity, 
and to expect that he who had brought them out of Egypt 
had a great future in store for them, towards which he would 
carry them triumphantly through every obstacle. The hope 
thus excited of a grand destiny would, without doubt, impart 
increased strength to that tenacity, endurance, and elasticity 
which have in all ages distinguished the people, would place 
them for many ages on a footing of equality with circumjacent 
tribes, more numerous, it may be, than themselves, and better 
skilled in the arts of peace and war ; would enable them to 
recover again by heroic effort from disasters and reverses 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 95 

apparently crushing and overwhelming, and not only to hold 
their own, upon the whole, when contending with varied 
fortune with their foes, but even to win for a brief period 
for their narrow territory an almost imperial extension. But 
this period of comparative prosperity was brought to an end; 
this joyous outlook received a rude shock, first from the dis- 
ruption of the tribes into two hostile sections, and afterwards 
from the appearance on the political stage of the gigantic and 
better organized monarchies of the East and West, by which 
the nation was successively assailed and brought into subjec- 
tion. Against these overwhelming odds its religious enthusiasm 
was of small avail, and its political condition became one 
of " chronic dependence " upon foreign powers. At the 
most, it could only exchange masters, and by the very 
necessity of the case, by the narrowness of its geographical 
limits, it was condemned to occupy not merely a subordinate, 
but a humiliating position among the nations. 

During the period when this change was taking place, the 
people could not but come to perceive that, except at rare 
and shortlived intervals, their fortunes had falsified the ex- 
pectations which seemed to be legitimately founded on their 
covenant relation to God, and that, to all human appearance, 
there was little to presage a better destiny in the future. 
The " boundless hopes " on which they had " fed " gave way 
to a more or less settled feeling of disappointment and de- 
spondency, and the alternative was, as it were, forced upon 
them, either of abandoning the thought of being a peculiar 
people and losing faith in the God of their fathers, or of 
throwing themselves with the whole force and weight of their 
souls on the hope of a better time to come, in which God 
would do something by way of fulfilling His engagements, 
and indemnifying them for the miserable realities of the past 
and present. Only in the form of such a hope could their 
faith in God survive. He had, as they firmly believed, given 
them ground to rely upon His unfailing patronage and pro- 
tection, and unless a revival of the national fortunes was in 
store for them, their faith in Him would seem to be a mere 
delusion. The alternative thus presented must have amounted 
to what may be called a prolonged crisis in the national life. 
The people could hardly but feel that they stood at the parting 
of the ways, and the choice lay between this and that. 



g6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

But men do not easily or with a light heart abandon a 
great hope, and, least of all, such a race of men as the Jews 
in all ages have proved themselves to be. And hence it came 
that, for the better part of the nation, or for the select spirits 
in it, the more tragic their present circumstances, the more 
tenacious did they become of their confidence in the ultimate 
issue. The feeling of disappointment in the present and the 
past turned to aspiration for the future, to the hope of a golden 
age to come, into which they threw their whole energy, and, 
in despair of all self-help, it seemed to them as if it was 
only by the manifestation of a divine power like that or 
greater than that which displayed itself at the Red Sea, that 
they could be delivered from the new bondage and oppression 
worse than that of Egypt, and that the faithfulness of God 
to His people could be and would be demonstrated. This faith 
is the very spirit of prophecy, the undertone which runs 
through it all and is often expressed, as in Micah vii. 15, 
" According to the days of thy coming out of Egypt will I 
show unto him marvellous things." Comp. Jer. xvi. 14, 15 ; 
Isa. xliii. 18, 19. But this faith, while it sustained the faint- 
ing heart of Israel, also generated or confirmed a mis-direction 
of the religious sentiment which we shall yet have occasion 
to explain. 

It was in this period of crisis and suspense, of mingled 
despondency and aspiration, that the line of canonical prophets 
appeared — a band of men, the most remarkable for services 
rendered to the development of the religious idea of which 
history makes mention, or with which any nation, ancient 
or modern, has been favoured. We can, indeed, only con- 
template the prophetic line with feelings of unmixed astonish- 
ment. So far as the discovery or rectification of religious 
truth is concerned, we must confess that the phenomena of 
the prophetic era seem to us to be even more marvellous than 
those of the evangelical era. Great as the shortcomings of 
the prophets may have been, they laid the ground for the 
final step in the development of religious thought, and pre- 
pared the way for Jesus, in a much deeper sense, than John 
the Baptist can be said to have done. Indeed, it is less sur- 
prising that Jesus should have " fulfilled " the prophets than 
that the prophets themselves should have arisen in ancient 
Israel and prepared his way. He did but put the finishing 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 9/ 

touch to the work of his predecessors in the prophetic office ; 
and this, though it was an immense advance upon their thought, 
was yet, as we shall see, not wholly beyond comprehension. 

By way of general characterization we may say that the 
prophet of Israel was also a poet, but he was more than a poet. 
The range of his vision took in other spheres besides that which 
has been claimed for the poet, whose eye " glances from heaven 
to earth, from earth to heaven." He looked behind and before, 
to the past and to the coming age. He stood in full sympathy 
with those feelings of veneration with which the vague tra- 
ditions of the olden time were regarded by the uncritical and 
unlettered age, yet he coloured and moulded these so as to 
make of them a vehicle and a sanction to his own higher 
religious ideas, transforming, yet more or less preserving, the 
traditions in their general outline. This was a treatment which 
he applied to the Mosaic and the pre-Mosaic tradition. The 
future again was for him an empty space, which, with a free 
hand, he furnished with forms and images, fitted to awaken 
and direct the aspirations of his people toward a better state 
of things. It was for this end that he thought out the grandly 
vague conception of a Messiah, and of a kingdom of God yet 
to come. 

Modern criticism has gone far to raise a presumption that 
the Old Testament was in the main the product of what is 
called the prophetic age of Israel — the age in which this nation 
" suddenly blazed out into a splendour of productive genius, of 
which its previous history gave but faint promise, and of which 
its subsequent history showed but little trace." (See Address 
on Progress, by A. J. Balfour.) There is no reason to doubt 
that many of the books which compose the volume are the 
works of the great men of that age whose names they bear. 
But, in addition to these, the historical books which, so to 
speak, form the connecting links of the whole volume, probably 
received their canonical form from priest-prophetic hands. 
Underlying these historical books there were, we imagine, 
chronicles of a more or less legendary character, to which 
reference is occasionally made, as, e.g. I Kings xiv. 18, 2 Chron. 
ix. 29. In other words, there were myths below the canonical 
myth, myths frequently revised and much overlaid, moulded 
and recast many times by the religious spirit which was ex- 
panding and growing apace, fed and nurtured by the very 

G 



98 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

history which it was employed in creating. Indeed, if we 
think of it, we may see that it could hardly have been other- 
wise. Perhaps the most conspicuous and remarkable feature 
of the prophetic books is the evidence they contain, that the 
authors, one and all, were possessed with the deep conviction 
that they occupied a platform of religious thought far above 
that of the great mass of their countrymen, and that, compared 
with their own thought, the notions and beliefs current among 
the people were but as the " chaff to the wheat." Now, what 
could be done by men of their ardent temperament but to 
recommend their own higher views to the unenlightened masses, 
in the only, or, at least, in the most effectual way open to 
them, viz. by moulding anew the ancient legends, by inlaying 
these with hints and foreshadowings of their own more ad- 
vanced ideas, introducing into the bare chronicle a pragmatism 
which was all their own, using the legends as a vehicle for 
impressing upon the minds of the people the higher principles 
of religion, so gaining for these a share or partnership in that 
pious reverence with which the people regarded their ancient 
literature. A learned class would have little difficulty in carry- 
ing out such a process unchallenged among a simple and 
illiterate people, and we regard it as the only effectual means 
of accomplishing their design of educating the people ; because 
the attempt, by means of direct or polemical teaching to 
eradicate superstitions which had been engrained in the popular 
mind by long inheritance and tradition, must have seemed to 
be the most hopeless of all tasks. The better and more pro- 
mising method for this purpose was to drop seeds of thought 
in favourable but unsuspected situations, and leave them to 
germinate silently and unobserved in men's minds. Not to 
dwell upon this point, and to take but two examples of what 
we are here saying, it seems to us that we may regard as 
such a seed of retrospective thought the well known passage 
(Gen. i. 26), " And God said, Let us make man in our 
image, after our likeness," words suggestive of ideas eminently 
counter to the polytheism current in the prophetic age. The 
polytheist knew nothing of an archetypal beauty and good- 
ness, and therefore fashioned his gods after his own image. 
Whereas the monotheist conceived of God as the embodiment 
of his own highest idea, and therefore rose to the thought that 
God had created man akin to Himself. Another example of 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 99 

the same kind may be seen in Gen. xii. 3, "In thee (Abraham) 
shall all families of the earth be blessed," words not obviously 
in harmony with the idea of divine favouritism of which the 
ruder masses of the people believed themselves to be the 
objects, but eminently suggestive of a truly prophetic idea, 
(Ps. lxxii. 19, Isa. lx. 3, and Isa. xlix. 6) "And the Lord said, 
It is a light thing, that thou shouldst be my servant, to raise 
up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel : 
I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayst 
be my salvation unto the end of the earth." Such progressive 
manipulation of chronicle and legend, under which the actual 
events of past ages were more and more lost sight of, was, we 
say, the most likely means of training the people to that purer 
faith to which the select portion of the people had risen by a 
more or less sudden bound, at a great crisis in the national 
history, to which we shall yet have occasion to advert. The 
consciousness of a higher religious standing, which is so con- 
spicuous in the prophetic books, was, we imagine, rendered 
all the more acute, unacquiescent, and intolerant towards the 
older forms of Hebrew worship, by the comparative suddenness 
with which, in vivid contrast to these, it " blazed up " in the 
prophetic mind. The prophet was a man who stood in the 
van of the religious movement. He gave literary expression 
to his advanced views in the form of psalm, or prophecy, or 
apokalypse, and he also sought to gain over the lagging masses 
of the people by such a reconstruction or redaction of the 
current legends and traditions as would bring these into 
accordance with his own higher views, so as to make of them 
an instrument of popular education and religious culture. We 
shall yet have occasion to observe that the last and greatest 
of the prophets (for it is in that light that we regard Jesus) did 
not make use of any such instrumentality for the education of 
his disciples. On the contrary he, very emphatically, discarded 
the employment of it ; confident in the power of his doctrine to 
reach the hearts of men, he declined to seek any basis for it in 
the revered past. In the calm certitude of his conviction he 
even set the authority of the past at defiance, as may be seen 
in Matth. v. 

But this observation does not shake our belief that the early 
legends, vague but time honoured, were adapted to moral and 
monotheistic purposes by prophetic men ; and it is by not 
L.ol C. 



IOO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

taking into account the probability of such prophetic redaction 
that an ingenious theologian like Dr. Matheson can persist in 
regarding these legends of the pre-Mosaic time as historical 
authorities, and draw from them the inference that the spirit of 
the Hebrew people was more large and charitable {i.e. univer- 
salistic in tendency) before the law was given than it afterwards 
became. He finds an evidence of this especially in the notices 
of Abraham and the patriarchs in the book of Genesis, those 
times of the " promises " of which St. Paul in his polemic 
against the Jews has made such ingenious use. But this 
inference involves such a reversal of the course of historical 
evolution, that we have no alternative but to regard the data 
from which it is drawn as introduced into the early history by 
prophetic redactors of a later age, who had a fore-glimpse — as 
we know that Jeremiah in especial had (Jer. xxxi. 31) — of the 
coming collapse of the Mosaic system, and of the rise of a 
more spiritual system, the establishment of a new and better 
covenant. 

The literary effectiveness of the prophetic band and their 
originality of style was the least of it. The marvel in regard 
to them is their absolute and vivid conviction of the monothe- 
istic idea ; their deep insight into the principles of the divine 
government, by which the triumph of right was secured, and 
into the nature of the service which God requires, with their 
passionate zeal for national regeneration. They were conscious 
that on such subjects they were charged with a momentous 
message to their countrymen, which burned as a fire within 
them, or lay as a burden upon their souls. It was with them 
as afterwards with St. Paul, when he said, " Woe is me, if I 
preach not the Gospel." And their grand concern was to 
disburden their souls and to deliver the message with effect. 
They were distinguished not only by their deep spiritual 
insight, but also by this, that they made no distinction between 
esoteric and exoteric doctrine, but entered boldly and hopefully 
into a dangerous conflict with the superstitions of the great 
mass of their countrymen, and at length achieved their purpose 
so far as to make their monotheistic view a common or 
national possession. 

For this end they did not rely upon mere reasoning and 
dialectic, though of these they had an overpowering command. 
They resorted to the device of clothing their own highest 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. IOI 

thoughts with divine authority, and compelling attention to 
their words by reporting them as the words of God Himself, 
and by constantly prefacing them with the formula, " Thus 
saith the Lord." This formula they used, we may be sure, in 
perfect good faith, though it may be difficult for us to conceive 
how such a thing was possible. Just as orthodox Christians 
who are conversant with the idea of supernatural grace, and 
believe themselves to be the subjects of it, yet do not profess to 
distinguish between the workings of their own minds and the 
working of the Spirit of God in them ; so the prophets of 
Israel may have identified their own highest thought with 
divine inspiration, and have given out the one for the other. 
The reiteration of that formula by men of such manifest 
sincerity, whose transcendent genius enabled them to sustain a 
high level of thought and language worthy of their elevated 
theme, gained for their teaching the credit of coming as a 
message direct from God Himself. This effect is probably to 
be seen in the popular usage (reprehended by Jeremiah xxiii. 
33-38) of speaking of the prophet's burden as if it had been a 
burden on the mind of God. 

The pictures which the prophets drew of a splendid future 
form what are called the Messianic prophecies. They sought 
to revive the national spirit by producing in more splendid and 
spiritual form the hopes that were struggling and floating 
vaguely in the popular mind. It is only, indeed, from the 
remains of their writings which have been preserved in the Old 
Testament, that we can infer the existence and nature of such 
feelings. We believe that they stood in somewhat the same 
relation of action and reaction to the popular sentiment of 
Israel, as we shall yet find that St. Paul and his coadjutors did 
to the legendary tradition of the Christian church. Their 
writings are evidently addressed as to people familiar with the 
feelings which they express, and appeal to sentiments which 
were current, and at the most needed to be spiritualized. They 
entered deeply into the national aspirations, as well as into the 
national feelings of impatience, disappointment, and chagrin. 
The aspiration with which the people at large turned to the 
future was, as we may well believe, in the first place a patriotic, 
popular, and only semi-religious sentiment, which did not 
originate in the prophetic mind, but was taken up and adopted 
by the prophets, partly, if we cannot say wholly, in the interest 



102 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of the monotheistic faith, and of the higher morality which 
were painfully and slowly evolving themselves in prophetic 
circles, and perhaps among the people at large, under the 
natural growth of thought and under the pressure of calamity 
and disappointed ambition. It is not improbable that political 
and dynastic interests may also have mingled in the prophetic 
mind with these higher objects. Just as the great Roman poet 
manipulated and embellished the Latin legends for the purpose 
of glorifying the Julian family, as a means of securing for it 
the veneration of the people, and contributing to the stability 
of the imperial regime, so there is reason to suppose that men 
of a prophetic spirit revised the legend of Israel, more or less 
unconsciously, for a purpose still more world-historical. 

While in all probability the people generally were inclined 
to regard their election as an unconditional act of divine 
partiality, and could not understand or explain to themselves 
the apparent hesitancy and vacillation of the divine purpose, 
the prophets gave emphasis to the idea that the law given on 
Mount Sinai was, as we have already said, the summary of the 
conditions by which the people might secure a fulfilment on 
God's part of His covenant purpose (Exod. xix. 5, 6). While 
the people in general might regard the calamities of the time 
as the natural effect of the overwhelming forces which precipi- 
tated themselves upon their small but devoted country, the pro- 
phets, on the other hand, in view of the degeneracy of the nation, 
made use of these calamities to awaken the moral sensitiveness 
of the people, and traced them to that national defection from 
the terms of the covenant of which they were partly the cause 
as well as the effect. They proclaimed that the calamities 
under which the people groaned had been brought upon them- 
selves by their neglect of the covenant obligations ; and that 
so far from giving ground to suppose that God had forgotten 
the covenant, these calamities were rather a proof of the 
contrary, viz. of His faithfulness to its terms. This is an idea 
which is specially worked out and insisted on in the last book 
of the Pentateuch, the work of a prophetic hand ; besides being 
everywhere given expression to in the books which are named 
after the prophets. 

At the same time, the idea of a covenanted relation between 
God and a single people, to the exclusion of all others, lent 
an element of caprice and partiality to the Jewish conception 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. IO3 

of the divine Being, from which even the prophets could not 
entirely rid themselves, and which continued, as will yet be 
seen, to act prejudicially upon their religious thought and 
sentiment. The God who could show such favouritism could 
also be thought capable of deviations from strict equity in 
dealing with the favoured people and in carrying out the 
stipulations of the covenant. In times of national distress 
and calamity the prophets laid the blame in general upon the 
people as not having fulfilled their part of the contract. But 
there were times and moods in which the prophets inclined 
to regard the miseries of the people as a proof that God 
Himself was forgetful of His promises and unmindful of His 
covenant obligations, and to cast blame upon Him, though in 
a deprecating and apologetic way. A tendency in this direc- 
tion often betrays itself in the Old Testament, but perhaps 
nowhere so clearly as in Psalm xliv., which, with all its tender 
deference, is little else than an argument with God to keep 
Him steadfast to His promises. " All this (evil) is come upon 
us ; yet have we not forgotten thee, neither have we dealt 
falsely in thy covenant" (v. 17); "Awake, why sleepest thou, 
O Lord? Arise, cast us not off for ever" (v. 23). The ortho- 
dox commentator can explain away this view of the psalm, 
but for us the question is " What was the feeling of the 
Psalmist himself, and what idea did it convey to his contem- 
poraries ? " and of this there can be no doubt. It would 
be easy to show that this idea of divine favouritism has not 
been altogether banished even. from the mind of Christendom : 
that our devotions are apt to degenerate into a suit to hold 
God to His engagements, and that this is an all but inevitable 
result when God's relation to us is conceived of as removed 
from a natural to a supernatural basis. But this is a subject 
which does not concern us here. 

If not absolutely free from anthropomorphic views of God, 
the prophets were at least emancipated from the coarser forms 
of these views. They entered into a conflict with the idol- 
atrous, polytheistic worship of the people, which could not 
but be very protracted, as we know it was, because of its 
peculiarly difficult and perplexing nature. It would, for ex- 
ample, be no easy matter for the prophets to demonstrate the 
connection of the sufferings and calamities of the people with 
their defection from the worship of Jehovah, the one true and 



104 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

national God. For the better and more enlightened portion of 
the people the national disasters might stimulate the develop- 
ment of religious thought and come in aid of the prophetic 
message. But in all religious and political controversies, one 
and the same condition of things can be plausibly explained 
by each of the opposing parties in support of its own position. 
And this would certainly be the case here. There may, for 
reasons easy to be conceived, be no very distinct indication in 
the prophetic writings of the fact, yet there can be little 
doubt that many false teachers might and did seek to impress 
the people with quite another view, viz., that these calamities 
were visited upon them because of the attempts made to put 
down polytheistic worship, and to deprive the ancient gods 
of the honours which they had from time immemorial enjoyed. 
To the ignorant and superstitious masses this view would 
commend itself, and it could be set aside, not by mere 
reasoning against polytheism and idolatry, of which there are 
splendid examples in the prophetic books, but only by the 
slow operation of the greater fervour and intensity of devotion 
which were distinguishing characteristics of the prophetic 
band. 

To justify the dealings of God with His people, and to 
show that these dealings were not at variance with the terms 
of the covenant, the prophets drew vivid and probably not 
exaggerated pictures of national sinfulness and depravity. 
The people had, it is true, the appearance of being very 
religious. There was no end to the multitude of their sacri- 
ficial and other outward services (Isa. i. 11). There was no 
cessation of these from the one end of the year to the other 
(Ps. 1. 8). But this did not satisfy the prophetic mind nor 
blunt the edge of prophetic invective, and it is easy to see 
the reason. In the first place, the predilection or liking of 
the people for ritual and ceremonial betrayed them into acts 
of idolatry, i.e., the worship of other gods besides Jehovah. 
The worship paid to Jehovah was distinguished from that 
paid to the gods of the nations, not so much by its forms 
as by its moral character and requirements. The similarity 
between them in point of form was apt in the case of the 
sensuous and unthinking multitude to put out of sight the 
difference in point of spirit, and to be a standing temptation 
to the people, if not to apostatize from the worship of Jehovah, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 105 

at least to join in the worship of other gods ; and this, in 
spite of, and perhaps even by reason of the impurities and 
sensuous excitement which were associated with the strange 
forms of worship. It is easy to see that such latitudinarianism 
of practice would tend, not only to degrade their idea of 
divine holiness, and to prevent the monotheistic principle, for 
which the prophets contended, from coming to full expression 
and universal recognition, but also to be an obstruction to the 
moral education and improvement of the people. Nay, more, 
even when the object of worship was the God of Israel the 
prophets had still occasion to be dissatisfied, and to inveigh 
against the people generally, because the latter gave all but 
exclusive attention to the outward form, and were oblivious 
of the inner and moral side of religion, trusting that they 
would atone for their moral deficiencies and conciliate the 
favour of God by the exactness and diligence of their ritual 
service. 

The polemic which the prophets waged against confounding 
worship with religion, and against the merging of piety in 
the practice of form and ceremony, is of constant recurrence 
in their writings. They do not, indeed, denounce or condemn 
ritual in the abstract, but only the over-estimation in which 
it was held as a means of pleasing God, and the disproportioned 
attention which was devoted to it, to the comparative neglect 
of morality and practical religion. One of them (Jer. vii. 22) 
went so far, in depreciating the value of the outward services, 
as to declare in unambiguous language that such services had 
never been enjoined by divine authority. An unrecorded 
tradition to this effect may have been known to Jeremiah, or, 
perhaps, he may have been cognizant of the principle to which 
Macaulay (ii. 6 1 6) gives expression where he says, " A really 
limited monarchy cannot long exist in a society which regards 
monarchy as something (specially) divine." So regarded, 
monarchy tends to become unlimited or despotic. Even so 
Jeremiah may have perceived that the undue value attached 
to outward rites was in part, at least, the necessary conse- 
quence of regarding them as a divine appointment ; and with 
the view of correcting the popular tendency in this direction, 
he may, in the power and logic of the prophetic spirit, have 
questioned the truth of the current tradition. 

Isaiah and Amos speak of the ritual services in a tone border- 



106 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

ing on contempt, as if they were all but useless and hateful in the 
sight of God, when disjoined from the practice of justice, mercy, 
and humanity, or offered in room of these. (See Isa. i. 13-15 
and parallel passages.) It is hardly to be conceived that such 
language could have been used had the Levitical law in its 
canonical form been in existence ; and we are led to suppose, 
either that the prophets knew by a tradition still extant that 
the Law or Book proper of the covenant was all or nearly all 
contained in the Decalogue ; or that by deep spiritual insight 
they had discerned that moral duties were all that were essen- 
tial to religion and distinctive of Jehovism ; that these possessed 
a paramount value, whereof no hint is given in the Levitical 
code, which draws no distinction between moral and ritual 
requirements, but places both as alike binding under the same 
directly divine sanction. The fact that the Decalogue is silent 
in regard to cultus is significant, and gives countenance to the 
conjecture that the cultus which in process of time was, as we 
shall yet see, elaborated as " a shield " to protect the religion of 
Israel from the inroads of heathenism, was in early times 
common to Israelitish and other forms of worship, and there- 
fore formed a link of connection between them which was a 
source of danger to the purer religion. There seems to be 
little doubt indeed that the outward technical forms in which 
the religious principle expressed itself, were observed by Israel- 
ites and other peoples very much in common. They were, in 
truth, the natural forms which had grown up and taken shape 
in ages antecedent to the patriarchal and Mosaic era. And 
the prophetic idea was that these forms were subordinate to the 
practice of justice and morality ; that the law which was bind- 
ing on man had nothing to do with cultus, and that it was only 
by being and doing good that man could please God. This 
definition of the mental attitude of the prophets towards ritual 
may be overdrawn, but we cannot read their writings without 
arriving at the conclusion that it comes near to the truth. 
Tried by the prophetic feeling, the Israelites were seen to fall 
far short of their covenant obligations, notwithstanding their 
great religiosity ; and from the prophetic point of view, the 
national calamities, so far from discrediting the terms of the 
covenant, were much rather confirmatory of them.* 

* Much has been written on the relations which subsisted between the 
priesthood and the prophetic line. It has been made out that at many of 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 107 

As popularly conceived, the relation between God and the 
people had originated in an act of arbitrary election, or as by 
the preference of a parent for a favourite child. The adoption 
and the privileges connected with it were supposed to remain 
in force irrespective of conditions ; or if not quite that, yet the 
conditional nature of the relation was apt to be left out of sight. 
The prophets were the elite of the people, the first to conceive 
of this relation as depending for its continuance, or for its 
renewal when interrupted, on the fulfilment of moral conditions, 
of which, as already said, the law was the summary. At least 
they were the first to give prominence to this idea, and to 
impress it on the minds of the people. They were the men 
who had discovered the great natural law, admitting of none 
but apparent exceptions, according to which the fortunes of 
men in the long run correspond to their character and 
behaviour, and national sins entail, sooner or later, national 
retribution. They were as much persuaded as the rest of their 
countrymen that God had entered into covenant with Israel, 
and even that its election had conferred upon it a character of 
indelible holiness ; but they were not blind to the fact that the 
covenant had not set aside in its favour that principle of the 
divine government. They perceived that this principle was 
still in operation under the covenant, and even with greater 
stringency and certainty of incidence than in the case of the 
less highly favoured uncovenanted peoples. 

This note was powerfully struck, and with great artistic 
effect and impressiveness by Amos, the first of the canonical 
prophets, in his two opening chapters. After denouncing 
judgments by the mouth of God, upon the surrounding nations, 

its critical moments, the history of Israel turned upon the conflict between 
them. It could hardly but be that the relations should often be hostile 
between the prophets who were the guardians of religion in its spiritual 
aspect, and the priests who were the guardians of its organization and its 
external forms and ordinances. It may be said in general that the priest- 
hood being hereditary and well organized, and having the guardianship of 
the outward forms as its distinctive function, represented the conservative 
or aristocratic party in the State ; while the prophetic line, having the 
spiritual interests of religion under its care, and being without organization, 
was desultory and occasional in its action, and represented the reforming 
and democratic party. But the details of the conflict as between parties 
are obscure, and in the text we speak simply of the conflict between 
principles. 



108 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

north, cast, south, and west of the Holy Land, he concludes by 
launching denunciations, in the same words, against Israel and 
Judah, as if God made no distinction between them and their 
neighbours, but treated all alike. Then, in the third chapter, 
as if to explain this — : to the people strange and surprising — pro- 
cedure, the prophet represents God as saying to them, " You 
only have I known of all the families of the earth ; therefore I 
will punish you for all your iniquities " — " punish you," that is to 
say, not merely in spite of, but by reason of my election of you. 
And the note thus struck keeps sounding more or less dis- 
tinctly through all the subsequent prophetic literature. Indeed 
in one passage, Ezek. xx. 37, it is clearly intimated that a 
position of peculiar exposure to penal visitation was in the 
bond of the covenant, involved in its provisions. The thought 
to which Amos had risen was this, that God had chosen the 
people not out of mere unmeaning partiality and caprice, but 
to train them to His service and make of them a holy nation ; 
that were He to allow them to continue in sin with impunity, or 
to "wink" at their iniquity, as He is elsewhere said to have 
done with respect to the Gentiles (Acts xvii. 30; xiv. 16), 
His purpose in their election would have been frustrated. It 
was necessary they should be made to understand that the 
" august principle of the moral government of the world," by 
which sin and suffering are indissolubly united, was not to be 
set aside or relaxed in their favour, because they were a chosen 
people ; but that, on the contrary, it would come out into more 
stringent operation in their case than in that of the less 
favoured nations, who knew not God, nor were known of 
Him. 

The inference from such a view was, that Israel could be 
" redeemed out of all its troubles," and prosperity and inde- 
pendence restored to it only as a sequel to the general revival 
of religion and to the truly national observance of the terms 
of the covenant. While the national life as a whole fell far 
below the prophetic standard, there was a remnant of the 
people which, not content with the observance of the merely 
outward forms of religion, strove to comply with its higher 
requirements as set forth by the prophets. Sometimes the 
prophets indulge the hope that the existence of such a remnant 
would in some way serve for the salvation of the nation at 
large. This cherished hope was, as will yet be seen, of deep 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 1 09 

importance for the development of Jewish and of Christian 
thought, and may easily be accounted for. The idea which 
had grown up among the people that a covenanted relation 
subsisted between God and the nation, naturally implied or 
suggested a certain solidarity of interest, spiritual as well as 
temporal, between the individuals composing the nation ; a 
solidarity which ought to be suggested indeed by many of the 
common facts and experiences of social life, but which might 
have escaped notice until it was made prominent by the idea 
of the national covenant. 

At other times the prophets express the feeling that salvation 
is not to be expected in such a vicarious way, and can be 
found only by means of a grand act of national repentance. 
But then the general moral elevation of the people, which 
seemed to be the necessary condition of such a result, was 
more than could be looked for. No elements were discernible 
in the great mass of the people to give the promise of better 
days. The situation outwardly and inwardly was too desper- 
ate ; corruption too deep-seated and wide-spread ; the hardness 
of the people's heart presented an insuperable obstacle. The 
feeling that such was the case is well reflected in the canonical 
histories of the people, in the compilation of which it is easy to 
see that the prophetic pragmatism was at work, to make it 
appear that the outward and political condition of the people 
was in close uniform correspondence with their moral state. 
The defections and relapses of the people are represented as 
being so frequent, their efforts at reformation so short-lived and 
resultless, that the prophets might well despair of producing 
the desired effect upon their minds, and be content if only 
there could be kept alive in themselves and in their country- 
men the hope and prospect of a time, yet distant, in which 
" righteousness and peace should kiss each other " ; and " the 
mountain of the Lord's house should be established in the top 
of the mountains." This consummation, however devoutly to 
be wished, was reserved for the " latter days." 

Through all the prophetic writings there also runs the idea 
that the high destiny, which as the covenanted people they had 
in prospect, would be achieved not by human power, but by 
some happy catastrophe, by some great act or manifestation 
of divine power. This, we say, was the prevailing expectation, 
though at certain conjunctures even the prophets, in their 



HO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

impatience for the event, seem to have imagined that it was on 
the eve of accomplishment by human and even by non- 
Israelitish hands (Isa. xliv. 28, xlv. 1). But, in general, the 
hopelessness of any reforming movement from within, and the 
visible fruitlessness of their own ministrations caused the 
prophets to fall in with the popular expectation of some great 
divine event, which would give a new turn to the national 
history, and bring to pass a state of things in which righteous- 
ness should flourish, and the chosen people receive the pro- 
mises. The hope of Israel, as it finds expression in the 
prophetic writings, is wavering, fluid, and variable, not to say 
contradictory. And in certain of these writings the great 
consummation is placed in some indefinite, not clearly ex- 
plained connection with the advent of a Messiah, or anointed 
messenger of God, by whom it is to be effected or ushered 
in. Presumably, this messenger was to be a member of the 
royal line of David — the man according to God's own heart — ■ 
to whom, as the chief instrument of the divine purpose, 
prophets and psalmists united in directing the hopes of Israel. 
Of this special form of the expectation we may say that it was 
the natural if not the inevitable sequel of the more general 
form. For, as the great dramatist says, " Such tricks hath 
strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, 
It comprehends some Bringer of that joy." It sees in some 
personal agency the possible removal of every obstacle. But, 
no matter in what form the event presents itself to the pro- 
phetic mind, the prevailing feeling is that the time for it is 
yet distant ; unknown changes must intervene, exhausting 
to patience ; the prophets' vision cannot penetrate the obscurity 
in which it is folded, it is for him an object of faith founded 
on God's past dealings with His people. There are no present 
signs of its approach, it is reserved for " the dim and distant 
future," and the cry, " How long, O Lord, how long," is 
wrung from the souls of the most hopeful. 

In respect of the prolonged tension of feeling and of ex- 
pectation here depicted the reader should beware of judging of 
its historical probability by applying to it the lines of the 
present. There is a time for everything, and the time for the 
growth of such a feeling is past. The conditions for it, as 
for much else that was once a living reality, are no longer in 
existence. This caveat need not be repeated, but it should be 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I I I 

observed throughout this discussion, in which every step is 
explained by keeping in view the conditions which led to it. 

There are few things more remarkable in history than the 
development of religious thought in Israel. Like other people, 
and fully as much as other people, the Israelites seem to have 
experienced great difficulty in realizing to themselves the 
existence and action of a divine Being, without organs, without 
shape or form. This ineptitude or incapacity does not, it is 
true, explain the origin of idolatry and of image worship, but it 
goes far to explain the tenacious hold which these had upon 
the people, even after the spiritual idea had dawned upon the 
higher minds among them. The prophetic line, and those 
among the people whom it represented, were those who rose 
above that debasing superstition, or, let us say, above that low 
level of religion. They regarded God as an object of purely 
spiritual worship. But it must have been, even for them, no 
easy matter to sustain themselves at that elevation. 

And, however, we may account for it, whether as a make- 
shift in that difficulty, as an object for the soul to rest upon in 
its moments of devotion, or to meet that craving for a great 
deliverer from their national calamities, which their covenanted 
relation seemed to warrant, there grew up among them the 
conception of a Being akin to the invisible God, fit agent and 
minister of the unseen Power, whose image, more or less human 
in its features, they could behold with the inner eye of the 
imagination, but which, from dread of a relapse into idolatry, 
they did not dare to represent in material form. No longer to 
be satisfied with material representations in human form of the 
invisible object of their worship, but not yet able to rise to the 
pure idea, they had recourse to the intermediate thought of a 
God-like Being in human form, a divine man, round whom 
their imagination could play. This shadowy Being they called 
by various names, as Son of God, or as Anointed of God ; not 
without a hope that in some hour of supreme need he might 
yet be revealed outwardly to mortal sense as a Messiah, as a 
Priest of more than human order, or as a mighty prophet 
like Moses, in the person of a member of the royal line of 
David. Some such Being, whom the feebleness or grossness of 
the human faculties rendered a necessity of thought, and who 
might be regarded as in some sense an integer of the divine 
nature, looms indistinctly in vague perspective in many pas- 



112 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

sages of the Old Testament. For, not to speak of the Book of 
Daniel, which has yet to be considered, we may see the 
evidences and traces of such an idea in Isaiah ix.; and in 
Psalms ii., xlv., and ex., etc. Mr. Arnold's attempt {Literature 
and Dogma, p. I I 3) to break down the force of many of these 
passages by representing them as mistranslations of the original, 
is of very doubtful success. This is, for example, very evident 
in what he says of the last of these passages, " The Lord said 
unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand." The seat on the 
right hand of God manifestly implies a participation in His 
dignity, as in the case of the Lamb, Rev. xxii. 1, 3. The 
idea to which we are referring crops up in enigmatic language 
more frequently perhaps in the Psalms than elsewhere, because 
these marvellous utterances of devotion contain gleams of 
obscure thoughts which flashed into the minds of the singers in 
moments of meditation and rapture, but did not admit of being 
expressed, except in the indistinct language proper to emotion. 
The mysterious character which this prophetic idea imparted to 
many passages in the Old Testament produced a puzzling effect 
upon many who searched the Scriptures in a later age. We 
can see an indication of this fact in the tradition (Matth. xxii. 42 
etc.) which represents Jesus as making use of the words in 
Ps. ex. to puzzle his Jewish critics : " How then doth David in 
spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit 
thou on my right hand. ... If David then call him Lord, 
how is he his son ? And no man was able to answer him 
a word." 

There is another indication of the same thing in the narra- 
tive of Philip's meeting with the Ethiopian eunuch, Acts viii. 
26-34. The question of the latter, "Of whom speaketh the 
prophet this ? of himself or of some other man ? " indicates a 
bewilderment of which many must have been conscious in read- 
ing the prophetic writings. Though not formulated anywhere 
in these writings, and though expressed in vague protean forms, 
the conception of this mysterious Being seems to have had a 
hold upon the Jewish imagination in later times, till in the 
minds of the disciples of Jesus it shot into distinct embodiment 
in the person of the risen Christ, and facilitated the develop- 
ment of the Christological dogma. For us it helps to explain 
the curious phenomenon that zealous monotheists, such as were 
the Jewish Christians, with St. Paul among the rest, could of a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I I 3 

sudden learn to regard Jesus as a son of God, partaker of the 
divine nature. 

If, as now said, the mysterious height to which the Messianic 
prophecies sometimes rise helps us to understand how the 
early Jewish Christians could clothe the risen Christ with 
divine attributes, it is more difficult to understand how the 
prophets themselves with their decided monotheism could 
entertain the notion of such a being, or what they really 
meant by it. The probability is that it grew out of the idea 
of the divine election of the people. Possessed by this idea 
the prophets could not fail to draw out its implications and 
to touch it to highest issues. The hopes of national greatness 
to which this election gave rise were boundless, and in the 
view of the national history and of the depressing circum- 
stances which seemed to stand in the way of the realization 
of these hopes, the prophets might feel that these could be 
realized only under the leadership of a member of the royal 
family endowed with supernatural powers, or by the descent 
of God Himself in human form to conduct the nation to the 
predestined summit. To the exalted patriotic imagination 
of the prophets this might seem to be the idea to which the 
election pointed, and in moments of enthusiastic vision they 
might pen the mysterious words ; for it has always seemed 
to us that many of the most splendid passages of their books, 
abrupt and unconnected with the context as they often are, 
were the utterances of momentary feeling on the heights of 
enraptured thought, of sudden risings out of the general 
despondency, or of guesses of the modes in which God would 
yet fulfil the engagements under which He had come at 
Mount Sinai. 

Before quitting this subject we may observe that the 
singular feature of prophetic literature to which we have now 
adverted may perhaps be traced ultimately to a source more 
remote than the difficulty common to men of forming a 
spiritual conception of the unseen Power or than the situation 
created for the Israelites by their election. The records of 
primitive civilizations have made us acquainted with the fact 
that in the early ages of the world kings or chief magistrates 
of the State, besides being commonly regarded as priests or 
intercessors between God and man, were also " revered as 
themselves gods, able to bestow on their subjects and wor- 

H 



114 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

shippers blessings which are commonly supposed to be beyond 
the reach of men. . . . The notion of a man-God, or 
of a human being endowed with divine and supernatural 
powers, belongs to that early period of religious history in 
which God and man are still viewed as beings of much the 
same order, and before they are divided by the impassable 
gulf which later thought opens up between them " (Frazer's 
Golden Bough). In ancient Egypt, and the East generally, the 
title of king seemed to imply divinity. 

With this fact in view, we say it is not impossible that 
the idea of a mysterious personage in whom human and 
divine attributes were confusedly blended may have come 
down as a dying echo from the dim and distant past, and 
been caught up by men of prophetic mind to shadow forth 
their conception of the great Deliverer whom Israel's evil 
days seemed to call for. It is not an unreasonable conjecture 
that in the devotional and liturgical literature of the prophetic 
era we may have a reminiscence or survival of the early mode 
of regarding the royal line of Israel ; not a rude survival, but 
refined and brought into harmony more or less with the 
growing thought of the times. This conjecture will not seem 
improbable if we take account of the persistency with which 
ancient superstitions linger on, and colour the faiths of a more 
enlightened time. That much of the later faith of Israel had 
its root in the dark superstitions of prehistoric ages there can 
be little doubt. In regard to some of these it may be said 
that they were anticipations or embryonic forms of the purer 
faith ; of others, that they survived to colour and to blemish 
the purer faith, which had evolved itself in the course of ages 
in spite of them and alongside of them. But this is a 
conjecture which, though capable of being worked out, as 
indeed it has been in various directions, need not detain us here. 

The belief in a coming Messiah was, so to speak, a secondary 
formation in the mind of Israel. The Messianic personage was 
the natural and imaginative embodiment of that divine aid and 
patronage of which the people had early conceived a confident 
expectation. This was the first step ; and this hope having 
thus assumed a personal shape, the person was next clothed 
with befitting attributes, and represented as a powerful and quasi- 
divine being triumphant over all the adversaries of the people. 
Sometimes he is addressed by the prophet in glowing, magni- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I I 5 

fying language ; sometimes he is represented as addressing the 
Israelites or the surrounding heathen in terms suitable to the 
various relations in which he might be supposed to stand to 
them. But the evolution of the Messianic idea was not com- 
pleted in Old Testament times, but reserved for the time of the 
New Testament, when it took up into itself another idea which 
had grown up simultaneously with it in ancient Israel. This 
was that of the suffering servant of God, who is Isaiah's (chap, 
liii.) portraiture of the true or ideal Israelite who fulfilled all 
righteousness, or of that small remnant of the people for whose 
sake the nation was spared. (In which connection see the 
prayer of Abraham for Sodom (Gen. xviii.), in which there is a 
foreshadowing, or rather a prolepsis, by prophetic hand of this 
conception.) The ideal Israelite was a prophetic conception, 
quite distinct from the apokalyptic conception of the Messiah ; 
so that, intelligibly enough, the Jewish commentators have 
always regarded them as separate subjects ; the Messiah being 
possessed of godlike attributes, which raised Him above suffer- 
ing, while the ideal Israelite, in the endurance of suffering, pre- 
sented humanity in its highest perfection. But the possibility 
existed that the two conceptions might flow together, or be 
fused into one. And this fusion took place when the early 
Church afterwards saw in the great sufferer, who had entered 
into glory, the combination of both and the fulfilment of all 
prophecy. In this fulfilment, however, it may be permitted 
to us to see not the evidence of prophetic prescience, but the 
culmination of a great prophetic idea, in which a radical and 
fateful transformation of Messianic thought was silently, and, as 
it were, authoritatively effected. 

Were we to permit ourselves to be guided in the interpre- 
tation of the prophetic books by the light of subsequent 
events, we might put upon much of their language a spiritual 
meaning beyond or different from that which it literally and 
primarily suggests. But undoubtedly it was a divine and 
miraculous interposition which much of it led contemporaneous 
readers to look forward to. When Isaiah said, " Behold your 
God cometh with vengeance, even God with a recompense, 
He will come and save you ; " or again, " Awake, awake, 
put on strength, O arm of the Lord, awake as in the ancient 
days. . . . Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, 
the waters of the great deep, that hath made the depths 



I 1 6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over ? " what 
could his countrymen be led by such language to think 
but that the prophet was pointing forward to some great 
miraculous event? And so too Jeremiah, when he spoke 
of a new covenant, if he did not himself expect that it 
would be heralded by some demonstration grander and more 
imposing than that at Mount Sinai (which when we consider 
the depth and keenness of his spiritual insight seems possible), 
yet assuredly this was the expectation to which his language 
would give rise in the sensuous-minded and uninstructed 
masses of the people. Nay, the probability is that such an 
expectation was devoutly cherished by the prophetic mind 
itself. For what else could find vent in that ejaculation of 
the Psalmist, " Oh that the Salvation of Israel were come out 
of Zion," or in that cry of the prophet, "Oh, that thou wouldest 
rend the heavens and come down"? It may be said that these 
are figures of speech, the language of poetry and of vague 
longing. But the longing or expectation which they express in 
their literal acceptation was for Israelites, the children of the 
covenant and heirs of the promises, the logical sequence, the 
all but inevitable deduction from their national theism and 
their national history. For according to the way of thinking 
common to people and prophet, the transcendency of God 
was so absolute that He was regarded as the sole actor in 
all mundane affairs, while men were but his instruments more 
or less passive ; so that, especially in times of sore calamity 
and national despondency, hope could best revive or be kept 
alive in the form of an expectation of some such providences 
as took place at the Exodus. Indeed we may say that a 
hope not unakin to this is so natural to man under a sense 
of his weakness in presence of the great forces of nature 
and of the great power of evil, that it does not wait for the 
prompting of special considerations and conditions. The 
hope of divine help conceived of as "poured in from outside" 
is as common to us of the present day as it was to the 
Israelites of old. The hope of divine help, miraculous or 
sub-miraculous, can only be held in check or corrected by 
the scientific ideas of divine operation and of human auto- 
cracy of which there was not a thought in Israel. 

In proportion now as the language of prophecy gave 
countenance to such an expectation, would its protest and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I I 7 

denunciation against the formal religious observances when 
disjoined from moral conduct miss their intended effect : the 
effort at national reform would be tacitly abandoned, and 
the people, content with a lower aim, would fall back upon 
a provisional and interim form of religion, i.e., the more studious 
cultivation of religion on its outer or ceremonial side. This 
result of prophetic teaching, uncontemplated but inevitable, 
would be fatal to all immediate strenuous moral effort, and 
make the people satisfied with doing less than their best. 
But two ends of not doubtful advantage would thereby be 
served. The cherished forms of worship being practicable 
and comparatively easy of observance would serve to keep 
up the show of regard to the divine will and give a religious 
air to the common life. At the same time, as we shall yet 
see more particularly, they would erect a wall of separation 
between the chosen people and the Gentiles, and keep the 
former apart and separate as a seed which could lay claim 
to the fulfilment of the promises. 

These remarks bring us down to the time of the exile, or 
Babylonish captivity as it is called, at which the last object 
just mentioned — the maintenance by the Jews of their separate 
and corporate existence — became of paramount importance, 
and could not but be recognized by the chiefs of the people as 
a matter of life or death for the religion of Israel. The great 
danger which assailed the nation during this period was, that 
being deported from its native seat in the sacred soil of 
Palestine; from the scenes which, even to this day, strengthen 
the faith of the stranger in the great events associated with 
them, it should give way to the tendency towards idolatrous 
services by joining in the worship of its conquerors, and adopt- 
ing their social usages. The ten tribes of the northern kingdom 
had apparently yielded to this temptation, and had become so 
completely amalgamated with the peoples among whom they 
dwelt as to have disappeared as a distinct people. We may 
take it for granted, in the case of these tribes, that this process, 
if not completed, was rapidly going on ; and that, warned by 
this catastrophe, either actually accomplished or visibly impend- 
ing, the leaders of the southern tribes in Babylon may have 
felt that this tendency had to be met and counteracted ; and 
the method by which this was to be done may have readily 
suggested itself to their minds. 



I I 8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

We have already adverted to the fact that the forms of 
worship practised by the Israelites in their native land were 
originally in a great measure identical with those of the heathen 
around them. But we may reasonably conjecture, or take for 
granted, that in the course of ages these forms had, in accord- 
ance with the religious genius of Israel, and in obedience to its 
moral and aesthetic instincts, differentiated themselves from the 
original forms that might still be retained by the non-ethical 
religions of the neighbouring nations. This process would 
as a matter of course go on gradually, silently, continuously 
and unconsciously, more especially after Israel had grown great 
and built for itself the magnificent temple of Jerusalem. The 
differences in form thus created may have been minute, yet 
when we consider the tendency of religious parties to attach 
importance to trifles, we may believe that minute and unessen- 
tial as these differences may have been, they might yet give 
countenance and encouragement to that feeling of selectness 
and apartness which was founded on the ancient legends of the 
nation. The conscientious and punctilious observance of such 
differences, while it would erect a barrier against anything like 
syncretism of worship, would also earn for the people either 
the ridicule or the hostility of their neighbours, and would thus 
become the badge of their faith, and the test of their fidelity 
to their national God, and on that very account be regarded as 
the matter of prime importance in religion, more so even than the 
usage and practice of a higher morality in which their superiority 
would be less conspicuous and not so easily maintained. 

Then it could not fail to be observed that the differences of 
form and ritual, in so far as they prevailed, acted as a restraint 
upon the Israelite, and made it less easy and natural for him 
to participate in the worship of other gods. The sinfulness of 
latitudinarianism was thereby kept present to his mind, and the 
difference in the object of his worship was made more impres- 
sive and more palpable by the difference in the form. In order 
therefore to apply an absolute check to idolatrous tendency, it 
was only necessary that there should be introduced into the 
existing forms, and in the line of previous development, new- 
features or details which would partially modify, but not go 
the length of essentially altering or obliterating, the customs 
or forms which had been long in use. The motive for doing 
this had, as we see, grown up out of the circumstances in 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I I 9 

which the exiled Israelites were placed, and there were men 
among them, such as Ezekiel and afterwards Ezra, by whom 
this was felt and acted on. 

There is every probability that the Levitical code as engrossed 
in the Pentateuch was compiled at this time, and that it was 
compiled for the very purpose of elaborating the ritual and 
making its distinctive features more prominent, so as to create 
such a chasm between it and the worship of other gods as to 
make conformity with both all but impossible. The only thing 
further necessary to ensure success to this procedure was to 
invest the code with indisputable authority, and this was done 
by incorporating it with the law of Moses in the Pentateuch, 
and so stamping it with that divine sanction which all regula- 
tions attributed to Moses had from time immemorial enjoyed. 
If we may judge from what we are told of the easy faith which 
Josiah and his subjects gave to the Mosaic authorship of the copy 
of the law found in the temple, there would b^ 1 ittle difficulty in 
obtaining credit for the improved and enlarged or Levitical 
ritual. It was brought out under the editorship of a priest 
party, from which the people were accustomed to receive the 
law as its custodiers and interpreters, and to whose authority 
in matters of ritual they were accustomed to bow. The authors 
of the compilation could easily persuade themselves that they 
were justified in referring it back to Moses, and editing it under 
his name, seeing it was carefully framed in the spirit of his 
legislation. 

From what has now been said, it will be seen that we do not 
wish to convey the impression that the Levitical code was im- 
posed upon the people by a concerted stratagem on the part of 
its compilers, to which the people generally were not privy. The 
compilation was a necessity of the situation in which the exiles 
found themselves. On the one hand there would be on the 
part of many a disposition to conform to the religious usages 
of the conquerors among whom they lived, which, if indulged, 
would end in the abandonment of their own religion : an effect 
which was probably far advanced, if not an accomplished fact, 
in the case of the ten tribes. But, on the other hand, there 
would be on the part of the more enlightened and devout, 
especially in the priestly caste, an instinctive feeling of loyalty to 
the ancestral religion prompting them to resist and counteract 
this tendency, and so to avert the calamity, as it doubtless 



120 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

seemed to them, of denationalization and absorption among the 
heathen. There were devout and clearheaded men who under- 
stood the situation, and saw that it was only by securing the 
strict observance of the distinctive ritual that this calamity 
could be averted ; men who may therefore on that very account 
have believed in all sincerity that revision of the ritual had the 
sanction of Jehovah. To this belief they gave practical effect 
by the compilation of the Levitical code, which probably did 
little more than elaborate and define the distinctive usages of 
Israel as then observed ; besides claiming for them, even to 
their minutest details, divine sanction and authority. And it is 
to this code principally, and to the circumstances that called it 
forth, that we have to trace that modification of the religion of 
Israel which goes by the name of Judaism. And the respect 
which this code enjoyed, however questionable in some of its 
effects, was what gave to Judaism its tenacity and power of 
self-assertion and resistance, over against the unsettling and 
encroaching influences of heathenism. 

After the return of the exiles and the resettlement in the 
Holy Land, the effect of the revised ritual and of the regula- 
tions referring to social intercourse with the outside populations 
which were then enforced was prodigious. The stop, which 
was thus put to mixed marriages and to participation by the 
Jews in the worship of other gods, effected somewhat forcibly 
and mechanically what the high and spiritual teaching of the 
prophets had failed to accomplish, for it was what mainly 
established the monotheistic principle in the minds of the 
people. The cross-fertilizing influence of Persian ideas may 
have contributed to bring about this desirable result, but un- 
doubtedly the result was due in the main to the new ritual and 
the more stringent social regulations laid down in the Levitical 
code. Up till this period of their history the Israelites had 
shown in their intercourse with other peoples a certain geniality 
of disposition and a certain impressibility that might be called 
excessive, a proneness to adopt alien customs which, as we 
have seen, was a source of danger to their religion, but the new 
ritual and new regulations tended to isolate them from the 
people among whom they dwelt, and created a barrier against 
an inexclusive and sympathetic ^contact with them. This, ac- 
cording to our view, was the purpose for which the ritual had 
been revised and enlarged. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 121 

There is no doubt a very prevalent tendency among religious 
men to adopt an elaborate ritual in the worship of God, but 
over and above this tendency, we hold that the motive now 
referred to operated at this conjuncture for the revisal and 
elaboration of the Jewish ritual ; and the ritual in its new form 
had a further effect, probably not contemplated nor foreseen by 
its authors, for it was calculated in a great measure to undo 
or neutralize whatever influence had been exerted by the teach- 
ing of the great prophets. This arose from the fact of its 
placing for the first time the moral and ritual observances of 
religion on an equal footing in faith and practice. The 
reverence Which up till this time had been tacitly and freely 
paid to ritual as a becoming usage approved by experience and 
recommended by tradition was now authoritatively claimed for 
it, as regulated by the same divine will and placed under the 
same sanction as that on which the Decalogue rested. A 
formal and statutory character was thus impressed upon religion 
in its principles and its manifestations alike. 

We see that the effect of the Levitical law was partly bene- 
ficial and partly injurious to the interests of religion, and that 
its publication and enforcement are quite sufficient to account 
for the remarkable transformation that passed upon the Jewish 
people at and after the time of the captivity. The injurious and 
deadening effect upon the national character was not, like the 
other, immediately apparent, and not even, it may be, sensibly 
developed for some ages. For notwithstanding the identifica- 
tion in theory of worship and religion which, as being of its 
very essence, the Levitical code brought about, yet in practice 
the monotheistic principle which established itself contem- 
poraneously in the minds of the people sufficed, as in the 
instance of Mahometanism, for a time to sustain the religious 
life at a high level and to give reality and substance to the 
forms of worship. There are not a few passages in eccles- 
iastical history to show that a deeply earnest and devotional 
spirit may be nourished for lengthened periods in connection 
with an elaborate ritual which in the long run, especially when 
its divine enactment is emphasized, absorbs the interest of the 
worshipper and tends to efface from his mind the distinction 
between religion and worship, and finally to reduce morality to 
quite a subordinate position and to throw the ethical aspects of 
religion into the background. It is to the period accordingly 



122 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of which we now speak, the period during and subsequent to 
the exile, that the historical critic now assigns a great part of 
the psalter, incomparably the finest manual of devotion which 
any religion, not excepting the Christian, has produced. The 
psalms contributed by this period may be regarded as the first 
fresh utterance of the monotheistic principle on its establish- 
ment in the popular mind, of its first full swell through the life 
of the nation, as the first accents of a devotion uttering itself 
under forms understood to be expressly sanctioned by the 
living God. 

To the same heightened feeling of devotion in the national 
mind may also perhaps be ascribed the institution of the 
synagogue, w r hich was no doubt due in part to a felt necessity 
for the more frequent enjoyment of emotional worship than 
was supplied by the centralized system advocated by the 
Deuteronomist and adopted by the Levitical law. To the 
exaltation of this same feeling or craving may also be attri- 
buted in part the heroic effort by which, under the leadership 
of the Maccabees, the Jews shook off the Syrian yoke. And 
in connection with our subject — the origin of Christianity — a 
product as important as any, of the heightened veneration of 
the Jewish people for the forms of their worship, was the book 
of Daniel. 

By the most competent critics this book is believed to have 
been composed in the midst of the Maccabean struggle, for the 
purpose of rousing the energies of the people to maintain the 
struggle and to bring it to a successful issue. With this in 
view it gives a vivid and realistic but wholly imaginary picture 
of the heroism displayed by youthful Jewish confessors of a 
former age, and confidently predicts the final triumph of the 
Jewish people over all their enemies, not so much by virtue 
of their own courage and devotion as in consequence of a 
divine intervention in their behalf. It mattered little to the 
men engaged in that terrible struggle whether the events ever 
happened which the book records. Enough that it set before 
them a noble picture of patriotism and of fidelity to the God 
of their fathers, and that it was calculated to awaken the same 
spirit in themselves, besides that it encouraged the hope of 
victory over their enemies by the same means. The question 
as to authorship and authenticity gave them no concern, and 
the book was secure of a place in the canon. Welcomed at 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 23 

first, we may suppose, by the intelligent few as a pious, and, for 
the time, useful invention, it would be received without suspicion 
as an authentic narrative by the people at large, and having 
served its purpose by nerving the nation to its conflict with 
Antiochus, it would ever after be revered as a book whose 
sacred origin was not to be questioned. 

The work is a sort of historical romance, with an apokalyptic 
sequel. This sequel is composed in imitation of the prophetic 
books of the canon, and though in a literary and ethical 
point of view very inferior to these, it is yet in many respects 
as interesting as any of them, in consequence of the great in- 
fluence which it exerted on the Jewish mind and of the relation 
in which it stood to the origin of Christianity. It affected to be 
written in an age much prior to the Maccabean and to predict 
or symbolize events which by that time had taken place and 
were known to its readers as matters of .history. By this 
simple expedient of antedating its composition and converting 
history into prophecy, it gained credit in that uncritical age for 
its prediction of events yet future. The seeming fulfilment of 
predictions which were penned after the events was accepted as 
a guarantee for the fulfilment of predictions which were actually 
such. The book thus became a powerful agency in awakening 
faiths and hopes which, by their intensity and by their adapt- 
ation to popular tastes and aspirations, were eminently calculated 
in the revolution of times to secure their own accomplishment. 
It also lent vividness and massiveness to the object, hitherto 
vague and shadowy, of Jewish longing, by specializing it as the 
establishment upon earth of a kingdom which would supplant 
the great monarchies of the earth, to which it would bear a 
family resemblance, while differing from them in respect of the 
righteousness of its rule and the pre-eminence in it of the 
Jewish element. Being written after the Levitical law had 
long been in existence and had taken full effect in moulding 
the popular mind, the book displays a certain hard and 
mechanical tone in its religious sentiments, and gives new 
emphasis to the circumstances which, in previous books of 
prophecy, had been more or less implied, viz., that the kingdom 
would be set up by a great and apparently abrupt manifestation 
of divine power. 

And, lastly, it is remarkable for this, that it distinctly con- 
nects or identifies this manifestation with the advent of one 



124 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

who is styled the Son of Man, the Messiah, or Anointed One of 
God. For the writer of the book, i.e. for the prophet whom he 
personates, as for Jeremiah, the time of the advent is yet 
distant, reserved for the latter days, many weeks of years 
must yet elapse before the set time arrives, but he writes also 
with a deep conviction that the time, though distant, will yet 
surely come and not tarry. An imposing air of certainty is 
even communicated to the event by the fixing of its date. It 
would take us out of our way to discuss the much agitated 
question as to the determination of this date. We shall only 
observe that, if, as seems likely, the author starts from Jere- 
miah's oracle regarding the seventy years, and, because that 
oracle had not been fulfilled to the full within these years, con- 
verts them into seventy weeks of years, the date predicted 
approximates to the actual date of the composition of the book 
itself, and must have been expressly intended to excite the hope 
of an accomplishment of the prophecy within the experience of 
the generation then living, and engaged in terrible struggle 
with Antiochus. That the book was written with the express 
intention of animating the Jews in that struggle is, of course, 
carefully kept out of sight, but the intention is betrayed by the 
very observable fact that its vaticinations, which, under the 
disguise of peculiar forms, are comparatively distinct and his- 
torical down to the Maccabean age, become vague and 
irrelevant to the course of subsequent history, just as might 
be expected in an apokalypse written in that age. It cannot 
be denied that the entire conception and plan of the book is 
exceedingly bold and original, eminently calculated to inspire 
the Jews with that confidence in the issue which ensured the 
success of their revolt, to make a deep impression upon the 
mind of succeeding as well as contemporary generations, and to 
give an impulse to the creation of that apokalyptic literature, 
several specimens of which, dating both before and after the 
Christian era, have survived to our time. These have a value 
chiefly for the testimony which they furnish to the prevalence 
of the Messianic expectation in the century preceding the birth 
of Jesus. 

This peculiar species of literature may be said to have been 
indigenous to the soil of Judaism, and to be an exclusively 
Jewish product. It had its origin in the existence among the 
Jews of the expectation, founded in their early history, of a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 25 

great future, and of a great leader to bring that future to pass. 
The tendency to forecast the nature of that future and to assign 
a date to the appearance of that leader could not but act 
irresistibly as a stimulus to the imagination, especially in times 
of great national humiliation and distress; and once the ex- 
ample of such a form of literature was set by the remarkable 
book of Daniel, it was followed by many works of a similar 
class though of inferior talent in the century and a half 
before the birth of Jesus, and the impulse thus given continued 
to operate in the succeeding century, during which the political 
situation had not altered for the better. Conceivably too, the 
impulse may have been strengthened during the latter period 
by the desire to present a different fulfilment of Messianic hope 
from that which Christianity offered. It even becomes a ques- 
tion, as will yet be seen, whether the book of Revelation in the 
New Testament canon, which belongs to the same class of 
literature and has largely influenced the course and character of 
Christian thought, is not in the main a Jewish production sub- 
jected to manipulation by Christian hands. The apokalyptic 
tendency could not, it is evident, exist in full force in the 
Christian consciousness, according to which the kingdom of 
God is not future but present, not visible but spiritual, affording 
no field or scope for apokalyptic emblems. But though Chris- 
tian faith and sentiment might not be able to originate and 
carry out an apokalypse of the ages to come, yet, as Jewish 
works of this kind were in existence, and were, as is known to 
be the fact, held in respect by Jews and Christians alike, 
Christian feeling might seek by interpolation and otherwise, to 
adapt them to Christian requirements. This, however, is a 
subject to which we may yet have occasion to refer more at large. 
So far as can be made out by the application of literary 
criticism the book of Daniel must have been written not much 
before the middle of the second century B.C., while the conflict 
with the Syrian monarchy was going on, and much about the 
time at which the Pharisaic party began to take its rise among 
the Jews. That the appearance of the book, or rather of that 
phase of Messianic expectation to which it gave expression, 
may have caused the segregation of a small and select section 
of the people who adopted its views, and were afterwards 
known as Pharisees, is not improbable. But in any case it is 
that book of the Old Testament which best represents their 



126 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

spirit ; and in after times they were the custodiers in Israel of 
its main ideas. The thought of an extraneous interposition 
which was emphasized in the book of Daniel far more than it 
had been in the great classical era of prophecy, was calculated 
to draw away attention from that moral regeneration which had 
been insisted on by the great prophets as essential to the 
nature of the coming time, and consequently to impart a formal 
and unspiritual character to the religious ideas connected with 
it. Grounding on the notion of a kingdom of God after the 
pattern of earthly kingdoms, the Pharisees and the people 
whom they led, could only conceive of religion as conformity 
to definite law and external usage, such as befitted a visible 
institution. By punctilious attention to legal and ceremonial 
observances they hoped to secure for themselves a full partici- 
pation in all its privileges. For them the kingdom in prospect 
lost its ideal character, and became unmoral in its conception. 
The hope of a great outward manifestation was, as we have 
already remarked, fatal to all higher moral effort, because it 
disposed men to be content with doing less than their best, and 
with the practice of formal services which, in their inmost 
hearts, they knew to be utterly worthless, because standing in 
no relation to the inner life, and having no tendency to effect 
an improvement in the social state. The habitual practice of 
such services was productive of that hollowness and hypocrisy 
of character with which the Pharisees were chargeable. And 
yet further, the combination of political aspiration with religious 
sentiment was another fatal circumstance, inasmuch as the 
former was sure to become the predominant and all but ex- 
clusive element, and to lend a mercenary character to the 
religious feeling. Religious services under these conditions 
partook of the nature of legal transactions by which men 
stipulated for the favour of God. And just such was the 
character impressed on the religion of the Jews by the pre- 
valence among them for centuries of the presentiment of a 
divine interposition, such as that, or greater than that, which 
was believed by them to have laid the foundation of their 
State. Indeed, we may affirm, that owing to this outlook the 
religion of Israel was alloyed from the first with a legal and 
mercenary spirit, tempered only by the prophetic spirit which 
engaged in a long but losing battle with it, and was at length 
extinguished by the triumph of Pharisaism. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 27 

According to this view the Pharisaic spirit was not an 
accidental phenomenon of Judaism, but rather the final and 
inevitable outcome of the idea, fundamental in the religion 
of Israel, and dating back to the very earliest time, of an 
arbitrary and sovereign election of the people. This assump- 
tion, while it strung up the energies of the people at certain 
critical moments of their history to a point not to be otherwise 
reached perhaps, was yet attended with this baneful effect or 
drawback, that it had an inherent tendency to throw into 
disuse the spiritual instincts of the people, as if God had 
Himself taken their spiritual interests into His keeping. It 
imparted a heteronomous aspect to morality and religion, and 
so involved the practical consequence that conformity to the 
requirements of both became formal, mechanical, and unspon- 
taneous. The prophetic spirit of a former age had been little 
else than a protest against the tendency in this direction. But 
the protest had been to little purpose, partly, no doubt, because 
the prophets were never able to emancipate themselves wholly 
from the very tendency against which they protested. Being 
inherent in the religion of Israel from the beginning, and there- 
fore constant in its operation, this tendency was sure, in the 
long run, to prevail against a protest, which, however vehement, 
was not thorough, but was directed only against a symptom 
while it spared the root of the evil. Prophecy touched its 
highest point when by the mouth of Jeremiah it announced the 
outpouring of a new spirit to be the great event or manifesta- 
tion to which the people had to look forward. But even for 
him this was an event which was to befal the nation at some 
distant time, to come upon it from without, to be, in short, 
heterosoteric. And it is not to be wondered at that prophecy 
had so often to complain that it had laboured in vain, and 
spent its strength in vain ; or that, when, exhausted by its 
ineffectual effort, it expired, the thought of that new spirit 
should have dropped out of the popular mind, and there 
remained only the longing for some great act of God to secure 
the pre-eminence of Israel among the nations; just affording an 
example of the disposition common to our race, to seek in 
external circumstances that true good which can only be found 
within. 

We have said that in spite of the identification of worship 
and religion which the Levitical Law brought about, the con- 



128 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

temporaneous establishment of the monotheistic principle suf- 
ficed for a time to sustain the reality of the religious life. But 
we have now to observe that in the course of time the co- 
ordination of the ceremonial with the moral and spiritual 
service could not fail to eat out the heart of religion, and to 
reduce it to a mere outward show. This result reached its 
climax in Pharisaism, for that must be our conclusion, unless 
we are to suppose that the terms in which Pharisaism was 
spoken of by Jesus were greatly exaggerated, his picture of 
it a mere caricature. And we have a voucher for the fairness 
and accuracy of the truth and fidelity of his language in the 
fact that his description of Pharisaism is just what we might 
expect as the inevitable outcome of the confusion of form 
and substance, of worship and religion. In the earlier and 
better ages of Israel the spirit of a true devotion found ex- 
pression for itself in ritual transactions, and so long as such 
a spirit continued to inspire the ritual, religion fulfilled its 
hallowing and elevating office ; but the tendency towards a 
mechanical observance of the ritual when unchecked, caused 
religion itself to degenerate into a dead work, uninspired by 
devout sentiment and powerless over the life of the worshipper. 
This was what had happened with the Pharisees of the time of 
Jesus, and with the people generally, so far as the influence of 
the Pharisees extended. The spirit had fled from their legal 
observances, and their religion was left a caput mortuum. A 
constitutional weakness or congenital taint may, for long, con- 
sist with a display of vigorous vitality in the animal frame, but 
is apt to reveal itself at last in premature decay or in some 
disease of a malignant type. The malign principle in the 
religion of Israel was the Pharisaic spirit, from which, even in 
its best days, it was never altogether free. When that spirit 
came to a head in the age of Jesus the religion had run its 
course, and could do no more for humanity. What was then 
needed was a new departure — involving the radical elimination 
of that inherited taint — which, as will presently be seen, it 
received at the hands of Jesus when he substituted the evan- 
gelical for the legal principle as the moving spring of the 
religious life. And it may be safely asserted that no step 
in the spiritual advance of humanity has so nearly answered 
the idea of a new creation, or of a radical reconstruction of 
pre-existing elements of thought in the religious sphere, unless, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 29 

indeed, we except the rise of the monotheistic principle in 
Israel. 

We have now seen how the mythical idea of a covenanted 
relation between God and the people of Israel became fixed in 
the minds of the latter, and how, owing to the actual course of 
their later history, there grew up among them the hope of a 
kingdom of God upon earth, in which all their disasters and 
disappointments would be redressed, and the covenant be 
amply fulfilled. The hope of such a kingdom formed a great 
part of Israel's religion, standing to it in somewhat the same 
relation as the hope of a future life does to Christianity. But 
before advancing to the consideration of Christianity we must 
briefly direct attention to other aspects of the religious life of 
Israel : to the development of its theological thought, which 
was concurrent with the growth of that hope, and intimately 
associated with it. 

It has already been mentioned incidentally that the mono- 
theistic idea was evolved in Israel slowly and painfully, because 
retarded by many cross and refluent movements of thought, 
having to contend and force itself into recognition against 
the prejudice and inertia of the inherited polytheism. An 
obstinate battle of varying fortune had to be fought for this 
purpose. So much can be gathered with distinctness from the 
historical books of the Old Testament, though these do not 
record the actual course of events, but only as they appeared 
to the monotheistic party at a later time after the battle was 
won or victory was in prospect. Until this point was reached, 
i.e., until the monotheistic principle was established or nearly so, 
there could be no such thing as any true advance in theological 
thought ; but, being reached, it became a starting point for 
ascertaining the character of the one true God and of His 
relations with men. For the monotheist, God was an all- 
powerful Being, limited neither by the existence of other gods 
nor by a fate behind and before all. But this power was at 
first unmoral, that is, arbitrary, capricious, and vengeful, a 
power controlled no more by inner than by outward force. At 
least, such a conception of God was in accordance with the idea 
of the national covenant. That idea grew up naturally when 
Jehovah was merely the national God : that one, out of the un- 
known multitude of gods, who had chosen Israel for his 
" portion " and " the lot of His inheritance." But even when 

1 



130 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the higher faith had grown up, that there could be but one 
God, supreme over the nations of the earth, Israelites could not 
or would not abandon the idea, so flattering to national vanity, 
that He had preferred them to all other nations, and singled 
them out as objects of His special favour. Yet the incongruity 
of such an idea with the character and even the dignity of such 
a Being could hardly escape attention. And at a later period, 
when the monotheistic principle had established itself firmly in 
the mind of the nation, and leavened its thought, some explana- 
tion of this obvious incongruity was felt to be necessary. 
Rabbinical research has shown that for this purpose the theory 
found favour that God had offered His Law, His Book of the 
Covenant, to the other nations of the earth, but that Israel 
alone had accepted its yoke, and that God's election had fallen 
upon Israel only after it had proved itself worthy by accepting 
His offer. Historical evidence in the Old Testament of the 
existence of such an opinion there was none, and even if there 
had been, it was far from really explaining the apparent incon- 
gruity. But it had a certain show of reason, which served, as 
may be seen in many similar cases, to stand for an explanation. 
Besides this popular idea, which ministered to national pride, 
there was the truly prophetic idea that the election of Israel 
was for no superior worth of its own, but a mere act of God's 
sovereign pleasure, an act, however, which had in view the 
ultimate elevation of the other nations of the earth. Passages 
to this effect, or pointing in this direction, are too numerous for 
citation, and furnish the first faint indication of a tendency 
towards universalism, or the denationalization of the religion of 
Israel, a tendency which, not being, perhaps, wholly palatable 
to national taste, the prophetic redactor has sought to warrant 
by introducing anticipations of it into the record of pre-Mosaic 
or patriarchal times, as a necessary and likely means of over- 
coming the prejudice of Jewish exclusiveness and assumption 
(Gen. xii. 3, xviii. 18, xxvi. 4, "The Lord said to Abraham 
(and to Isaac) ... in thee shall all families of the earth 
be blessed"). And the same idea is taken up by psalmists, 
and prophets, and apostles in later ages, to explain as 
economical the apparent preference shown to Israel. The 
conception of God is gradually purified by the elevation of the 
moral sentiment. The thought of God as an arbitrary, partial, 
vindictive Being gives way to that of a righteous and impartial 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 3 I 

Ruler, and of one who is merciful as well as just, deeply 
interested in the welfare of Israel indeed, seeking to train the 
nation to the love and practice of righteousness, but also 
anxious for the spiritual welfare of other nations (Book of 
Jonah), not offended merely by insults offered to Himself, His 
name, and His worship, but much more by the injustice per- 
petrated by man against his brother man, who is God's child 
and offspring. It dawns also upon the prophetic mind, not 
steadily perhaps, but fitfully, that He is not merely a just and 
righteous Being, careful of the true welfare of His children, but 
even tender and gentle in His treatment of them, patient of 
their infirmities and backslidings, sparing them in His anger, 
and grieving to punish. He pleads with Israel as a husband 
whose affection cannot be vanquished even by national faith- 
lessness, or as a father whose fondness is only stirred by the 
rebellion of his \30ns. He implores them to reason with Him, 
and He threatens, only that He may escape the necessity of 
executing judgment. Comp. Ps. xviii. 35, Hosea xi. 8, Micah 
vi. 3, Jer. xxxi. 20, Book of Jonah. Yet it must be confessed 
that even the prophetic hold of this higher conception was 
wavering and unsteady, as is conspicuously apparent in the 
psalter, where the old popular, or, we may say, heathenish, and 
prophetic sentiments follow each other in baffling confusion, in 
irreconcilable juxtaposition. Not a reader but is surprised, if 
not pained, to see that the breath of vengeance and the breath 
of mercy blow by turns through those wonderful compositions, 
which were probably among the last, and were in some respects 
the greatest products of the prophetic spirit. 

But the development of religious thought in Israel went on 
in other departments besides that of the strictly theological. 
The Covenant was represented as being made with the nation 
at large ; it dealt with the people as a whole, and this was an 
important feature which could not be let go, because, while it 
brought the individual into no immediate relation to God, it 
seemed to secure a participation in the benefits of the Covenant 
to every individual without distinction. But in the later pro- 
phetic age the claims of the individual were recognized, and his 
personal relation to God was brought into prominence. The 
idea of individual responsibility emerged in addition to that of 
the nation at large, and the idea of a personal immortality took 
its place side by side with that of a corporate or national 



132 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

immortality. In regard to this last, it seems as if the early 
Hebrew legislator had felt that he could make nothing of the 
strange and distressful views of a future life which had been 
elaborated in Egypt, and had therefore left all such out of 
sight. The fact that his code was for civil life may also have 
had something to do with this apparent oversight, or there may 
have been, as we are inclined to think, a collateral religious life 
and system of belief which his code of law did not touch upon, 
but took for granted. For the literature of a people does not 
always, or necessarily, reflect the full volume of its life. But be 
this as it may, the effect of this omission in the early literature 
of the Israelites was to concentrate their thoughts in the long 
run on the possession and enjoyment of the Holy Land by 
themselves and their posterity, and to cause them to find con- 
tentment in the present service of God, and in the present 
sense of His favour. It was only when that possession became 
insecure and disappointing that the people turned in upon 
themselves ; and the hope of a future life, which could never 
have been quite extinct in Israel any more than elsewhere, 
received a more and more pronounced expression in its litera- 
ture. The faint presentiment grew into a struggling faith, as 
may be seen in the prophecies of Ezekiel, in a few of the 
psalms, and in the book of Job, until, in the apocryphal book 
of Wisdom a firm belief in immortality is expressed for the 
first time without any sign of misgiving on the subject. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE IDEA OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD, AS TRANSFORMED 

BY JESUS. 

After this review of Jewish thought and aspiration, we feel, 
when we place it in the light of the New Testament, the incom- 
pleteness and imperfection of it all. But we also feel that we 
stand on the very threshold of Christianity, and that another 
step will carry us into another and higher region of thought. 
And yet, between the taking of that step, which disclosed the 
larger horizon, and the date at which the more creative and 
purely Jewish period of prophecy had run its course, an interval 
of about 400 years elapsed. For, if we except the contribution 
made to Messianic doctrine in the apocalypse of Daniel, and in 
a few of the psalms, the canonical writings, which are now 
generally assigned to this period, made little or no real or sub- 
stantial addition to Jewish theology. As to the apocryphal 
literature belonging to this period, the greater part of it bears 
an unmistakable and undiluted Jewish character ; but part of it, 
especially the book of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, affords in- 
dications that the faith of Israel, at least among the Jews of 
the dispersion, was beginning to be touched (as we know from 
other sources that it was) by Hellenic influences; and if, by this 
process, the religion of Israel was to some extent, and in some 
circles, denationalized, we may consent to regard it as a pre- 
paration for the universalism of the Gospel. But it has to be 
taken into account that the advance thus made was probably 
not felt in Palestine itself, and was literary and academic, rather 
than popular or practical, and above all, that in the absence of 
that new principle which the Gospel was afterwards to supply, 
the elements of Hellenic thought were too disparate and too far 
apart from the thought of Israel to admit of a living fusion. In 



134 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the hands of the great Hellenist of Alexandria the semblance 
of such a fusion was only given by an unstinted use of the 
allegorical interpretation of the sacred writings, which was too 
visionary and too artificial to take hold of the general mind. 

The rabbinical literature, which seems to have had its rise in 
this same uncreative period, was purely Jewish in its character, 
and was mainly occupied at its best with matters of ritual, with 
comments on the canonical Scriptures, and in working out into 
rigid and fantastic forms and conclusions the spiritual and 
poetic ideas of the prophets. The result of all this literary 
activity was to confirm the national religion in that deadness 
and formality towards which, as already shown, it had an 
inherent, obstinate, and ever-besetting bent. By means of the 
synagogal services and addresses, which stood largely if not 
entirely, no doubt, under rabbinical influence, the theology 
which thus grew up established itself in the popular mind, and 
remained, as will yet appear, to exert a powerful influence upon 
the dogmatic constructions of St. Paul. But Jesus was the 
heir of the prophetic ages pure and simple. The " basis in 
himself" had no affinity with distinctively synagogal doctrines, 
Pharisaic or rabbinical: these touched only to repel him 
(Matth. xvi. 6, " Take heed," he said to his disciples, " and 
beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees"). 
And the elements of thought which combined in his mind to 
produce the new synthesis of religion, were all more or less 
present in germ at least and by anticipation in the prophetic 
writings. 

We have, therefore, to explain to ourselves as we best can 
that great hiatus in the prophetic line, that comparative blank 
or arrestment of creative thought just before it received its final 
consummation, and made its great advance in the Gospel. 
This curious circumstance may be accounted for by the tenacity 
with which the idea of a visible kingdom of God upon earth 
had laid hold of the Jewish imagination. This idea, as will 
yet appear more distinctly, paralyzed religious thought, and 
placed an embargo on its further development. No doubt this 
idea had possession of the mind of Israel even in prophetic 
times. But in that creative and productive period the idea was 
fluid : the elastic vestment with which the spiritual thought 
was clothed admitted of its expansion ; whereas, in the sub- 
sequent or intermediate period the idea hardened and stiffened 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 35 

into an inflexible dogma by which thought was strangled, 
and before another and further step could be taken, there was 
needed a man of religious insight and of superb spiritual force 
to rend, that inelastic band, to discard that sensuous dream, 
that fiction so alluring and fascinating to the vulgar mind, and 
to conceive of that kingdom as an empire of the spirit : such 
a man, indeed, as only comes once in many ages, once, it may 
be, in an aeon. It almost seems to us as if such a man might 
have appeared any time during these four hundred years, were 
it not that the historical conditions which were requisite for the 
success of his work may also have been necessary for the 
production of the man himself. Certain it is that in that long 
interval no man had the moral courage, or the spiritual insight 
to liberate the imprisoned spirit of prophecy. As water may, 
for a space, retain its fluidity after the freezing point has been 
reached, so generation succeeded generation without a man to 
stir the moral atmosphere or to speak the needed word, though 
the age called for it and the conditions were present. For here 
we may alter the common proverb and say, " Cest le dernier 
pas que coute." But at last the man did appear, and the word 
was spoken when Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God 
was within men. In these words he drew together the two 
separate lines along which the thought of Israel had travelled, 
and from their contact or point of convergence, there diffused 
itself a new light over the whole field of religion. The 
principle thus propounded was the manifesto or watchword of 
his religion, and the hour in which he first uttered it witnessed 
the birth of Christianity. 

It has been often said with a truth that cannot be disputed, 
that Christianity was rooted in the religion of Israel, or 
that the one was a developed form of the other. But, as we 
proceed, we shall see that it was a development partly by way 
of recoil or reaction. The prophetic or creative period of the 
old religion had passed away, and instead of being followed by 
a period of epigonism, or of feeble reproduction, as it might 
have been, it was followed by a period in which the legal 
element, which prophecy had not surmounted, was taken up 
and pushed to a one-sided extreme, until to the searching eye 
of Jesus it betrayed its radical defect. From this he recoiled, 
or he reacted against it, and took up anew the forgotten 
spiritual element of prophecy, and gave to it (in his doctrine of 



136 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the evangelical relation) its full development. The recoil and 
the development were but different aspects of his work. 

The great achievement of John the Baptist, which formed 
his title to be considered the forerunner of Jesus, was his 
renewal under altered conditions of the prophetic protest 
He reacted against Pharisaic formalism, and called back the 
attention of his countrymen to the absolute necessity of a 
righteous life. He did not cease to look for the consummation 
which Israel desired in the establishment upon earth of a king- 
dom of God ; but he recognized its spiritual character in so far 
that it could only be inherited by a righteous nation, which, 
however observant it might be of the rites and ceremonies of 
religion, would not consider them to be of primary value, or 
even of a value co-ordinate with the moral and spiritual duties 
of religion. He showed how much he subordinated the former 
by making absolutely no allusion to them in his preaching. 
What he did was to call upon men to repent, and to change 
their lives by way of qualifying themselves for the coming 
kingdom. The outer manifestation of the kingdom was for 
him a certainty, a necessity ; but it was not all nor nearly all ; 
the external event was to go hand in hand with a spiritual 
revolution in the nation and in the individuals composing it. 
He told the crowds which listened to him that it was not 
enough for them to have Abraham for their father, and that 
their entrance into the kingdom of God would, in no sense, be a 
mere right of birth or thing of privilege, but had to be qualified 
for by a better mode of life, by fruits meet for repentance, by 
works of humanity, of justice, of honesty, of beneficence, and 
brotherly kindness, and generally by the adoption of a higher 
standard of morality for the visible life and conduct. We 
know now that the requirement of right and virtuous conduct 
can be satisfied only when there is a corresponding disposition, 
and that there is reality in the outer life only when it is a 
reflection of the inner life. But John did not enter upon this 
idea, and he fulfilled his part by preparing the way for the 
more searching and spiritual doctrine of one who was to come 
after, and by rousing men to the necessity of a more strict 
conformity to the divine law in the overt form of their lives. 
Hence his preaching was intensely earnest in its tone but 
narrow in its range ; and however startling it may have been 
at a time when the rites and ceremonies of religion almost 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 137 

obliterated from men's minds the obligation of the higher cult, 
yet, like that of the prophets, it failed to go to the root of the 
evils of the age, and only attacked the symptoms, and could 
never have laid the foundation of a religion fitted to make a 
permanent impression on the world. 

Perhaps we should not be far from the truth if we affirmed 
that he only gave prominence to duties which were generally 
recognized as such, but were practically forgotten without 
offence to the conscience ; that he laid emphasis on duties 
whose obligation no one could seriously question, but which 
the men of that generation did not lay much to heart. He 
had a keen discernment of the low moral condition into which, 
in spite of their religiosity, the people had sunk, showing itself 
in laxity of life and conduct, and in a disregard or violation 
of many social duties. But he did not trace these evils to their 
deep lying source, and he did his part by urgently denouncing 
them, and calling men to amendment of life as the means of 
restoring a better social state, and so preparing for the advent 
of the kingdom of God. 

The prime and indispensable aim of all moral and religious 
teaching is to rouse the better will from that semi-torpid languid 
state which allows the immediate natural and uppermost inclina- 
tions to have their way without let or hindrance, to a state of 
active and resolute exercise. Now this tendency, which John's 
teaching no doubt had to a certain extent, was in a great measure 
counteracted by the expectation to which he gave countenance, 
as the ancient prophets had given, of a supernatural interposi- 
tion by which a better state of things morally and religiously 
might be established. 

John preached the necessity of repentance, indeed, or amend- 
ment of life, as a means of preparing for the expected event, or 
even of hastening it on. But still he spoke of the event, and 
taught his countrymen to think of it as a thing which would 
come to pass, irrespective of individual or national amendment, 
so that they would naturally regard it as the cause, rather than 
as the effect, or even the accompaniment of a higher national 
life. They could hardly but be encouraged by his doctrine to 
trust that this event, when it did come to pass, would turn to 
their advantage as children of the covenant and heirs of the 
promises, and thus to continue their attitude of expectancy, 
instead of exchanging it for one of energetic moral action. 



138 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Such teaching might not be wholly without effect ; it might 
operate beneficially by awakening the hope of better things, 
and stirring up the minds of men to put the house of their 
souls in order. But that better state of things could never be 
inaugurated until men began to be acted on by quite another 
understanding, viz., that the kingdom of God — the supreme 
good connected with that expression — was not a thing to be 
waited for, or to come upon them from above, but a thing 
which was to spring up from within. 

That the Baptist, notwithstanding the depth and force of his 
moral feelings, still looked for the establishment of the kingdom 
by means of a great visible manifestation, and that to that 
extent he shared in the carnal and worldly ideas of his 
countrymen, and in their tendency to " seek after a sign," 
is evident especially from the message which he sent from his 
prison to Jesus, " Art thou he that should come, or do we 
look for another ? " He doubted whether Jesus could be the 
Messiah, notwithstanding the excitement caused by his teaching 
and the power of his doctrine, because he had inaugurated no 
new order of things, and had either wrought no miracle any 
more than John himself, or perhaps because the miracles which 
he was reported to have worked were not sufficiently notable 
or stupendous enough to mark him out as the promised 
Messiah. In Jesus he recognized a teacher greater than him- 
self, a teacher come from God, the very ideal of a religious 
teacher, worthy it may be in all respects to be regarded as the 
Messiah, except in the one respect that his teaching was 
accompanied by no great signs and wonders from heaven, nor 
by the establishment of a divine monarchy ; in fact, -he expected 
that the Messiah would be something more than a teacher, and 
that teaching would be the least of the Messiah's functions, 
instead of the highest and greatest, as it was in the case of 
Jesus. For the same reason that Judas betrayed his master, 
John seems to have doubted his Messianic mission. 

And we may sum up our estimate of him by saying that the 
prophetic spirit was renascent in him, the main distinction 
between him and the prophets being that for him the divine 
event or manifestation, which was to make all right for Israel 
and to satisfy its expectations, was near at hand, had come 
within a measurable distance, and might fall within the experi- 
ence of that generation, while they had seen it as a far-off 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 39 

vision, as an event not to happen in their age but at some 
distant period, and after the lapse of many years. It has been 
conjectured with much probability that John calculated on the 
nearness of the time, because, in his opinion, the misery and 
humiliation of Israel under a foreign yoke had reached their 
climax, and the hour of Israel's necessity would prove to be 
God's opportunity. Many passages in the prophets seemed to 
warrant the expectation that God would arise for the salvation 
of Israel in a day of extreme calamity. And such a day could 
not but be thought (by a man like John of fervid patriotism 
and deep moral earnestness) to have arrived at that time of 
national degradation. He had not been able, any more than 
the prophets, to disenthral himself from the sensuous expecta- 
tions of his countrymen, and from the beliefs which clustered 
round the idea of their covenant relation with God. And 
whatever immediate and apparent response his protest against 
the formality and unsound moral condition generally of his 
contemporaries may have called forth, it was doomed, like that 
of the prophets before him, to make no permanent impression, 
had it not been taken up by a mightier than he. 

We have the concurrent testimony of the synoptic Gospels 
that Jesus began his work by calling on his hearers to " repent, 
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," an announcement 
identical in form with that of John the Baptist. From this 
circumstance some recent writers have drawn the inference that 
the doctrine of Jesus was a mere continuation or repetition of 
John's. By way of making out that whatever is novel in 
Christianity is due to Paul rather than to Jesus, that Paul 
rather than Jesus is the founder of our religion, they have 
even gone the length of saying that there was nothing novel 
or distinctive in the doctrine of Jesus. But this thesis receives 
no support from the announcement with which Jesus broke 
silence. The expression "kingdom of God" was not new in 
the mouth of Jesus any more than it was in the mouth of 
John, but the idea which the former expressed by it was new. 
There had been a longing in many hearts for some better social 
state than had yet been seen, and men had vaguely pictured 
out to themselves some such state, but no one had ever come 
within sight of the idea which Jesus had laid hold of. 

In the mouth of a Jew the words "kingdom of God" ex- 
pressed his conception of the summum bonum — of an idea 



140 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

common to all nations in one form or another, congenial we 
may say to every human heart. In so far as the idea of right- 
eousness was embraced in the Jewish form it might be a higher 
conception than that of any other people, but in so far as the 
kingdom was conceived of as restricted to the Jewish nation, it 
was a mean, selfish, and disennobling conception — a reflection 
of the strange contrasts in the Jewish character which have 
made it an enigma in history. The element of righteousness 
in the idea was the preserving salt, the redeeming ingredient 
which needed only to be accentuated and spiritualized as it was 
by Jesus to destroy its particularism and convert the particular- 
istic into a universalistic idea. Jesus broke ground by his 
announcement that the kingdom of God was at hand, but his 
whole subsequent teaching showed that the kingdom which he 
had in view was different in nature and in its mode of coming 
from that of which John and all preceding teachers had spoken. 
And it will appear more and more as we proceed that the 
opening words of Jesus, though identical in form with those of 
John, were entirely different in spirit and intention. In em- 
ploying the formula of John to convey a new meaning Jesus 
did but follow an instinct common to all religious reformers, to 
bring out to popular apprehension the continuity of the new 
with the old and pre-existent beliefs, to gain the general ear, to 
facilitate intelligence, and to avoid offence while awakening 
attention. 

For John the kingdom of God was a visible system or 
institution, differing in some respects no doubt, but in many, 
perhaps in most others, resembling the kingdoms of the world. 
John expected that it would come with pomp and outward 
demonstration, so that men would at once and without difficulty 
recognize it for what it was, not less than if it had been seen to 
come down from God out of heaven like the holy city, the new 
Jerusalem of the Apocalypse. But for Jesus it was an invisible 
or rather an ideal kingdom, which would come, when it did 
come, " without observation," i.e., unobserved by many, without 
visible show or circumstance, a kingdom which would have its 
place and power " within men," and would work secretly in the 
hearts of men and propagate itself by infection or sympathetic 
contact as by a sort of leaven from soul to soul. By some 
avenue of insight or meditation or experience he had made the 
discovery that the only possible kingdom of God was the reign 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 141 

of righteousness in the souls of individuals and in society as 
composed of individuals ; that it could come into existence or 
manifestation only in so far as righteousness prevailed ; that it 
actually did already exist wherever righteousness did prevail ; in 
short, that it consisted in a state of mind and a manner of life, 
and could be approached or laid hold of only by means of a 
resolute and energetic surrender of individuals to the will of 
God. He had seen plainly that the fleshly passion of the Jew 
for national supremacy even were it gratified would only ag- 
gravate the real evils of his lot and enhance the moral dis- 
tempers of the time ; that the greatest evils under which the 
people groaned were self-inflicted, and could not be remedied 
by external agencies, that, under every change of circumstance, 
even were it such as might tax divine power to produce, 
enough would still remain to debar them from true blessed- 
ness. 

According to Jesus the kingdom of God was identical with 
the reign of righteousness ; the one did not form a complement 
to the other as John and others believed, nor did they admit of 
being separated in thought as if they were distinct phenomena. 
These negative determinations are evidently conveyed in that 
notable counsel, to " seek first the kingdom of God and His 
righteousness, and all other things shall be added." The full 
meaning of these words may be best brought out by a slight 
change in their arrangement, as thus, " Seek first the righteous- 
ness of God and His kingdom shall be yours, and all other 
things besides shall be added to you." The true kingdom of 
God, the only kingdom deserving the name, that good thing 
which you ignorantly seek, whose nature you misconceive, will 
be found in seeking the righteousness of God. If that right- 
eousness become the main object of your pursuit, if the search 
for it become your ruling passion, the kingdom is yours 
already, yours of necessity, yours ipso facto, just as he also said 
that the kingdom was theirs already in possession who were 
poor in spirit and pure in heart. This was a thought which 
John never reached, and as little did any of the prophets before 
him. To us it may seem self-evident, and it has passed in 
substance as a common-place idea into the thoughts of men. 
But to the men of that day it was novel, hardly intelligible to 
any, and no doubt offensive to many. The thoughts of the 
Jewish people had for ages been running in quite another 



142 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

direction, towards a kingdom in which righteousness of a sort 
might indeed prevail, but towards a kingdom which had other 
and more attractive attributes, which would not only satisfy 
many other longings besides the love of righteousness, but 
longings which were the reverse of righteous, into which the 
idea of righteousness hardly entered, and between which and 
the love of righteousness it would have puzzled them to trace 
any very obvious connection. The expectation cherished by 
the Jews could not be satisfied with a spiritual revival which 
could only begin in the self-reformation of the individuals 
composing the nation. A consummation to be thus attained 
seemed, apart from its difficulty, mean and inadequate com- 
pared with the expectation of a grand national renovation 
based on their covenanted relation to God, an " all too 
simple fare " for men who had long been " fed on boundless 
hopes." 

The ideal nature of the kingdom of God is defined materially 
by its identification with the reign of righteousness, but formally 
by that saying (Luke xvii. 20, 21), "The kingdom of God 
cometh not with observation : neither shall they say, Lo here ! 
or, Lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." 
According to these latter words the kingdom has its seat in 
the hearts of men, hidden there and invisible like everything 
that is truly great in human life. Jesus might mean that it is 
within men, i.e., within all men in the limited sense, that their 
lives are conditioned consciously and unconsciously by God- 
ordained and spiritual laws. And probably the more adequate 
and correct rendering of the words is that the " kingdom of 
God is among or in the midst of you," which we may under- 
stand as referring to the objective presence of the kingdom, in 
the fact of that divine order which is the expression of divine 
wisdom and goodness or of that " tendency which makes for 
righteousness." In the spiritual world objectively considered 
there are certain laws which obtain eternally, and which 
condition the life of man even when he does not take cogniz- 
ance of them or reflect on their existence, or even does what he 
can to thwart them. But when these laws disclose themselves 
to his consciousness and are accepted by him as the guide and 
rule of his life, they acquire a new potency and a new signifi- 
cance. In that case the kingdom of God may be said to come 
or to spring up in the heart, and its laws through being recog- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 43 

nized and reflected into the consciousness, unfold a power of 
changing the life which they did not previously exert. This 
is what is involved in the words of Jesus, what the words 
suggest to the modern mind. And an analogous instance will 
show that what takes place here by the revelation of spiritual 
law to the consciousness takes place in other spheres of thought 
and being, or, we may say, universally. 

There is an electric force which under its proper laws has 
always been in existence, operating from the beginning through- 
out the universe, and conditioning the physical life of man, 
though unknown and unsuspected by himself. But an im- 
mense difference for the life and environment of man has been 
created in modern and recent times by his discovery of the 
existence of that force and by his application of it to his own 
use and benefit. Even so the discovery of spiritual laws and 
the application of them to the guidance and government of 
human life may be compared or almost said to amount to the 
rise of a new kingdom in the midst of men, and is calculated 
to put a new face on society. Simply by their disclosure to 
human consciousness they are fitted to make all things new 
and to revolutionize human affairs. The kingdom of God had 
in a sense, as we see, been always present, always operant 
among men in God's world, only it had been latent ; its exist- 
ence like that of other forces had not been apprehended, be- 
cause men had not the eye to see it ; they did not know where 
to look for it. And what Jesus did was to take away the veil 
that hid it from them. He did not create it, or lay its founda- 
tion, or bring it into existence. He only disclosed it to their 
eyes, he apprized them of its nature, taught them where to look 
for it, that it was in the midst of them, that it was nearer than 
they thought, and he showed them the way to become members 
of it ; a service this so great no wonder that the church learned 
to revere him as the Head and Founder of the kingdom itself. 
And yet in the very fact that this kingdom, consisting as it 
does in the rule of spiritual laws, was always present, there lay 
the possibility that it might disclose itself, or, to use the lan- 
guage of Jesus, might draw nigh to men at any moment. 
Centuries before his day the idea of such a kingdom dawned 
upon a man of prophetic spirit, and was dimly but strikingly 
expressed by him (Deut. xxx. 1 4), where he says that the word 
of God, which we may understand of the gospel of the king- 



144 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

dom, or of the righteousness of God, with which St. Paul (Rom. 
x. 6) brings it into connection, was not hidden from men nor 
far off from them, but in their mouth and in their heart to do 
it. The obvious meaning of which language is that the higher 
and hidden life of righteousness being near at hand may at any 
moment disclose itself, as no doubt it often has done, sporadic- 
ally to individuals here and there in all ages and countries. 
But the secret having found no adequate utterance, and having 
left no record of itself, always died upon the lips of the initiated 
few, and went no further until it was plainly translated into 
speech and uttered into life by Jesus, and by him laid as 
the foundation of a new, self-propagating, self-perpetuating 
society. 

Let no one object, as many do, to the idea here presented of 
the kingdom of God, that it is too abstract and modern to have 
been entertained by Jesus, or that he shared in the expectation 
common to John the Baptist and the Jews generally of a visible 
and concrete manifestation of the kingdom of God. To us it 
appears that the negation of this Jewish idea is the very element 
and measure of the novelty of his doctrine. There is no evi- 
dence whatever that he expected the kingdom to exist in a 
massive or institutional form, or to be identified with any out- 
ward or visible state or corporation. He probably expected 
that the movement which he sought to inaugurate would spread 
by the extension of the reign of righteousness over society at 
large, leaving existing social aggregates and organizations much 
as they were. His simple, unfigurative, and fundamental pro- 
position with regard to it was that this kingdom was within 
men, i.e., spiritual and ideal ; and this proposition must be held 
to control the interpretation of all his utterances with regard to 
it, whether made by himself or by disciples in his name. That 
his thought dwelt exclusively on an ideal kingdom, or, as it is 
less properly styled, an invisible kingdom, is shown by the 
notable proposition just quoted, whose authenticity is guaranteed 
by the fact of its being reported as his by men to whose ideas 
on the subject it ran counter. And a certain presumption is 
also lent to this view by the fact that one at least of his 
predecessors in the prophetic line came near to him in this 
direction. The thought of Jeremiah was so engrossed by the 
effusion of the new spirit which he foretold, that he was com- 
paratively indifferent to the preservation of the national life 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 145 

and the maintenance of the temple service. Wcllhausen says 
of him, that he did not expect that his way of thinking could 
ever become the basis of a national life, and that " instead of 
the nation, the heart and the individual conviction were to him 
the subject of religion." For Jesus the kingdom of God existed 
already in every individual who airhed at conformity with the 
will of God. It might exist under many forms of government, 
it might arise without creating disturbance to any existing 
institution. In becoming members of it men became as a salt, 
a light, or a leaven in the earth, terms all of them expressive of 
a force which works secretly, silently, and unobtrusively. This 
purely ideal nature of the kingdom is also expressed by St. 
Paul where he says that it is " righteousness, peace, and joy in 
the Holy Ghost" (Rom. xiv. 17). And the circumstance that 
the personal followers of Jesus and even Paul himself, for a 
time at least, clung to the idea of a second advent and a new 
earth is for us a proof, not that Jesus had given encouragement 
to such an idea, but that inherited Jewish notions retained a 
hold of their minds in spite of his teaching, or that the natural 
tendency to let go or exchange the pure idea for a sensuous 
embodiment of it was too strong for them, and prevented them 
from entering fully into his thought. For such reasons we are 
disposed not to accept as genuine any language attributed to 
him which is, or is supposed to be, inconsistent with this idea, 
however abstract or modern the idea may be. 

Than this saying of Jesus none more profound or far-reaching 
has ever been uttered. It comes near to saying, or rather it is 
identical with saying, that God himself is within us, a saying 
which has been often 'muttered in the philosophies both of the 
old and the modern time, but which no philosophy has had the 
boldness or the strength to stand or to fall with. It amounts to 
this, that human nature is potentially divine, that the God of 
whom we should stand in awe is not the God above us or the 
God around us, but the God within us ; and that when we pray 
to Him it is but our higher nature in its weakness communing 
or pleading with our higher nature in its ideal strength, deep 
calling unto deep. When it was first uttered it declared the 
futility of the Jewish expectation that the kingdom of God was 
to come upon men from without ; and for the present time it 
declares the futility of saying that the grace of God is " a life 
poured in from outside," for, as Jesus elsewhere explained it, 

K 



146 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

" Not that which entereth the mouth defileth (or purifieth) the 
man, but that which cometh out of the mouth." The tendency 
to seek a sign or symbol of the divine presence in the universe 
is ineradicable in human nature, or, we may say, an ultimate 
principle in it. The grand error is that men look for an outward 
sign in past historical everfts, or in some present day experi- 
ence, instead of looking for the sign within themselves, in that 
higher nature which exists ideally in every man. This was 
what Jesus taught his disciples to do, but his thought was too 
great and too deep for the apprehension even of St. Paul, the 
chiefest of his apostles, and hence this greatest of his followers 
thought he had found that symbol, or shechinah of the divine 
presence, in the embodiment of that ideal nature, in the person 
of Jesus himself, where it has stood for his disciples to this day 
so as to interfere not a little with that spiritual worship of which 
One alone is the object. 

The great revolution which Jesus sought to effect in the 
mental attitude of his countrymen, and which he more or less 
imperfectly succeeded in effecting in the case of his few disciples, 
is clearly intimated in his language concerning John the Baptist 
as recorded in Matth. xi., where he says, " All the prophets and 
the law prophesied until John." The meaning of these words 
is, that prophetic men had seen the kingdom of God as afar off; 
they regarded it as a thing not yet present, not yet possible, 
but reserved for future manifestation or for the latter days, and 
devout men, like Simeon, were taught by their prophecies to 
wait for it as the " consolation of Israel." John again repre- 
sented a point or period of transition. He was more than a 
prophet, notwithstanding that the least in the kingdom of God 
was greater than he. It seemed to Jesus as if John had 
advanced beyond the prophetic stage, as if the word of the 
kingdom had trembled on his lips, but that he was not able to 
utter it. John had a presentiment of the approach of the king- 
dom as of something just about to be revealed, about to come 
into existence. He had a faint glimmering of its true nature, 
but he could not grasp it firmly, he could not reach or express 
it fully. This was reserved for Jesus to accomplish. And 
while he adopted the formula of John to begin with, that 
the kingdom of God was at hand, his whole subsequent teaching 
implied that it was already there. In Matth. xii. 28 and Luke 
xvii. 2 1 he says so, in so many words, and he could mean 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 1 47 

nothing less when he declared that it was already in possession 
of the poor in spirit. Not only had the kingdom of God, objec- 
tively considered, been always present ; he could say of it, 
subjectively considered, that it had come at the time he spoke, 
because he had discovered it and divulged to his disciples its 
true nature, because he himself was in the midst of them a liv- 
ing proof in his own person that the new era had begun, and 
because they themselves, through sympathy with him, had 
begun to be conscious of its presence, to submit to its rule, and 
to enjoy its blessedness. We may here mention that we do 
not suppose that the various expressions which Jesus uses with 
respect to the proximity or presence of the kingdom of God, 
viz., that it was at hand, that it was (already) come, that it was 
in the midst of them, betoken any growth in his view of its 
nature, any maturing of his thought in regard to it. They 
are but varied expressions accommodated to the occasion, or 
to the audience, of the one idea, which was essential to his 
doctrine. 

This doctrine was that the kingdom of God was not a thing 
to be waited for in the expectation, which the Jews entertained, 
that it would drop down upon them from above without effort of 
their own, for it was already in the midst of them ; yet so, we 
have now to add, that, to be enjoyed or taken possession of, it 
had to be sought for and striven after, to be laid hold of, or, to 
use his own words in the discourse just referred to, to be 
I taken by violence," to be seized by force, — emphatic language 
employed to give point to the antithesis between the attitude 
of men's minds towards the kingdom of God before and after 
the time of John. In fact, the doctrine of Jesus may be 
described as a summons to men to forsake or relinquish their 
passive and expectant attitude for an energetic, resolute, and 
impetuous entrance into the kingdom. And simple as this 
summons may appear to be, it is enough, when received and 
acted upon, to change the whole aspect of religion, the whole 
character of the spiritual life, and may we not also say, the 
whole course of human history. These great effects may be 
expected from it, because by the removal of a heterocratic 
bandage from the human will, it allows the whole force of that 
will to deploy and set itself free. When carried out to its full 
and legitimate consequences, this doctrine will yet discharge 
the supernatural element from the religious life, and substitute 



148 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the power of the idea for the power of a hyperphysical agency 
upon the heart. 

It appeared, in our remarks on the religion of Israel, that its 
watchword was " wait," wait for the great event which, as the 
elect people of God, you have in prospect. The attitude of 
expectancy thus imparted to the Israelitish mind, was the 
inevitable effect of their mythical history, or of their election 
and covenant relation, by which it was suggested to them that 
their final salvation would be an arbitrary sovereign act of God, 
like that which had been manifested in their election, and in no 
sense an act of their own. The watchword of the religion of 
Jesus was just the opposite. It was, " Wait not." Wait not 
for any event whatever. The kingdom of God is already 
come, it is in the midst of you ; you have only to lay hold of it, 
to take it by violence (Matth. xi. 1 2), to enter it by storm. 
Formally considered, this injunction was distinctive of the 
religion of Jesus over against Judaism: it demanded a complete 
change of mental attitude towards God and the spiritual world. 
It implied that God was a being of infinite good will, who 
placed no obstruction in the way of man to the highest good, 
but left the attainment of it in man's own hand, so that man 
had only to will, that he might, with the full consent of God, 
enter into possession of the highest bliss. 

Taught by an experience of which we have no record, Jesus 
had gained a distinct and luminous apprehension of the truth, 
of which many in all ages have had glimpses, and of which the 
modern mind is rapidly getting a firm hold, that " for the 
individual there is no radical cure outside of human nature 
itself for the evils to which human nature is heir," that " within 
ourselves deliverance must be sought," and that " God says to 
each of us, If thou wilt have any good, take it from within thy- 
self." He asserted the freedom of the human will as few teachers 
have ever done. He took for granted that there is a power 
intrinsic to the soul of man to react against the evil, to dis- 
engage itself from the chain by which it binds him, and to 
break that causal nexus by which one sin draws another after 
it. His own experience had inspired him with the confidence 
that man, at the bidding of the ideal, has a power within him- 
self to lay the cross upon his strongest inclinations, to practise 
self-renunciation, to enter the strait gate, to make righteousness 
the first object of his pursuit, to subjugate the tendencies of his 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 1 49 

lower nature, and so to become a member of the kingdom of God 
which, for him, was equivalent to the highest conceivable good. 
From such a conviction as this, the immediate inference was 
that there was no need to wait, or to look as John and the 
Pharisees did, for any higher good, or for a miraculous manifesta- 
tion of any kind from heaven, for that all true help could in 
the last resort come only from within in the form of self-help : 
not from the God above, but from the God within us. Jesus was 
no iconoclast, and with that reverence for the past which was 
conspicuous in him, he might still retain the belief in which he 
had been educated, that a messenger from heaven was about to 
appear on earth ; but it was still more clear to his mind, with 
the clearness and certitude of experience, that men ought not, 
and needed not, to wait for the appearance of such a messenger, 
for that every man had the key to the kingdom of heaven in 
his own hand: that by applying that key he might be a Messiah 
to himself as well as to others by persuading them to do the 
like for themselves. It was only " an evil and adulterous 
generation " which insisted upon " a sign from heaven " to 
announce the presence of the kingdom, or waited for a celestial 
messenger to inaugurate the reign of righteousness — adulterous 
perhaps, because, while professing to long for the kingdom of 
God, it had an eye to a kingdom which was not of God. 

To avoid misapprehension, however, let it be carefully noted 
that the autosoteric, # or self-saving, self-helping process to 
which Jesus sought by his teaching and example to animate 
his followers, does not exclude help from without, according to 
the laws of our nature. In illustrating this proposition we 
glanced in a former passage of this discussion at the philosophic 
idea of the Ich and the Nicht Ich. According to this idea the 

* The writer of this volume has adopted the terms " autosoteric " and 
" heterosoteric " from E. von Hartmann. But the idea expressed by the 
term " autosoteric " was expounded by the writer in a sermon on " The 
Renovating Power of Christianity," published some years before he had read 
von Hartmann's " Krisis," where the word occurs, and where it is denied that 
the term can be applied to the Christian system of religion. The idea that 
the term did, on the contrary, describe the religious process, not indeed as it 
appears in the Pauline dogma but as taught by Jesus, was the outcome of the 
writers own reflections, not to say experience, and was what led him to alter 
his view of the Genesis of Christianity and to produce this work, of the many 
imperfections of which, considered as a presentation of that view, no one can 
be more aware than himself. 



15O THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

germ of the better nature within us requires to be developed, 
the law of our being to be fulfilled, through the trial of contact 
with the good and the evil around us, the good having been 
reinforced in Christian lands by the light of truth, of which 
Jesus, as we believe, gave the highest and purest expression ; 
or by what Mr. Arnold calls " the secret and the method " of 
Jesus. But, not to go back upon that idea, and to use a less 
abstract if less adequate illustration, we say here that the auto- 
soteric doctrine must be qualified, if qualification it can be 
called, by observing that there are forces inherent in the 
universal order ; God ordained, independent of the will of man, 
which yet come to his assistance when he fulfils his part ; that 
is to say, when he places himself in line with them, or when, by 
self-denial and self-discipline, and the control of his uppermost 
tendencies, he adjusts his action to their operation, and so 
avails himself of their aid. Whereas, when a man expects 
by mere force of will, or by the act of faith, to call into 
operation some force which . is above nature, and which 
would not come into operation except for this act of his, 
this is the simply heterosoteric view, which was not known 
to Jesus. 

The forces here referred to may be said to be conveyed to 
us through the social environment, that is, through our organic 
connection with the race of which we are members ; and 
admittedly they form an indispensable help to the individual 
who is intent on self-discipline. Apart from them, indeed, such 
discipline is neither practicable nor conceivable. But, however 
favourable the social environment may be, there is need, in the 
last resort, for an act or decision on the part of the individual 
himself to bring it to good effect, and to render it helpful to his 
discipline. The influences which radiate from society, even 
when it is Christianized, being partly good and partly evil, 
affect men differently, and there must be a certain elective 
affinity by which the individual assimilates the good in the 
formation of character ; which affinity consists in a determination 
or habit, however unconscious, of the man himself. In this 
sense it may be said that the existence of such influences does 
in no way clash with the autosoteric character of the doctrine 
of Jesus. 

But, besides the injunction of self-denial and self-abnegation, 
Jesus also inculcated the great doctrine of the forgiveness of 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 5 I 

sins, and it may be thought that this doctrine is at variance 
with what has now been said as to the autosoteric character of 
his teaching. To show, therefore, that such is not the case, a 
few remarks upon this doctrine will here be necessaiy, though 
the subject is one which will afterwards engage more of our 
attention. 

Forgiveness of sin is an expression used by Jesus to denote 
the most salient or central phenomenon of the religious life. 
It is the interpretation, from a theistic point of view, of a 
profound experience of man's inner life, or of a law of that 
universal order through which and through which alone, God 
acts. According to this law it is, that for every individual 
who truly and resolutely turns from sin, and makes it his main 
aim to conform to the ideal requirements of his nature, his 
involuntary lapses and shortcomings cease to weigh upon his 
conscience, and to cause division or schism in the soul, and 
from being a source of intolerable self-reproach and discourage- 
ment, become a spur and stimulus to a better and ever better 
life. The relief thus experienced from that distressful and 
debilitating feeling, and the momentum thus imparted to the 
spiritual life, cannot but be traced by the devout theist to an 
act of oblivion and of grace on the part of God. That is the 
light or the aspect under which this fact of the inner life 
presented itself to Jesus, and was presented by him to his 
disciples ; and as it is with his point of view and his manner of 
thought that we have here to do, we need not trouble ourselves 
to ask if there be any more pure, more abstract, or philo- 
sophical explanation of the fact. Of the great practical value of 
such a view of it there can be no doubt. For a man thus to 
identify the working of his own higher or ideal nature with the 
presence of God within him, or to connect it with the thought 
of the God above him, the effect will be to lend intensity to his 
reverence for the ideal, and to impress him with the necessity 
of being true and honest, and of making sure that his sense of 
relief does not rest upon mere self-delusion and conceit. Pos- 
sessed by the conviction of the placability of God, the mind, 
unfettered by the haunting fear of a divine Nemesis of treasured 
wrath and of the arrears of guilt, and thus, " at leisure from 
itself," resolutely addresses itself in spite of the physical and 
social consequences of past sin which remain, and in spite of 
the persistence of contracted habits, to persevere in its endea- 



r 5 3 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

vour after the better life, and finds its reward in a sense of 
growing conformity to its own higher impulses.* 

According to a theist, then, such as Jesus was, this great and 
crowning fact of the inner life is a proof, that, in consideration 
of the honesty and sincerity of the individual, God, who looks 
to the heart and the intention, takes the will for the deed, 
which is what is meant by divine forgiveness. There is here 
nothing supernatural. The belief in divine forgiveness is not 
awakened by supernatural illumination, nor is forgiveness itself 
imparted by any supernatural act of God. The man simply 
takes the verdict of his own conscience as the verdict of heaven. 
Just as the sinner feels, by the constraint or law of his own 
nature, that he is an object of divine condemnation, because he 
is condemned by his own heart, so the penitent, who turns from 
his sins, feels that divine condemnation is lifted from his soul, 
because his own heart has ceased to condemn him (i John iii. 21), 
"If our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward 
God." We see, then, that divine forgiveness is not to be under- 
stood as importing any heterosoteric element into the spiritual 
renovation of the individual, or as in any sense implying the 
influx of an extraneous divine power into the stream of life. 
Being ever at hand for the penitent to lay hold of, it is rather 
the condition, or system, under which the individual is placed 
for carrying on the self-educative, self-redemptive process. And 
we shall only add that in its theistic aspect, as taught by Jesus, 
the doctrine of forgiveness is not, like a theorem of Euclid, 
demonstrable by pure and abstract reasoning, nor like a his- 
torical fact, to be established by the evidence of human testi- 
mony ; but it is an idea, or suggestion, which verifies itself 
practically in the experience of individuals by the beneficent 
influence which it exerts on their life and conduct, and by its 
enabling them to carry on the struggle with their lower nature. 
Apart from this struggle, the doctrine of forgiveness, however 
firmly believed, becomes a dead letter, or worse, an injurious 

* If any man, without conscious reference to the Divine Being, and out of 
pure reverence for the ideal, places the latter before himself as the aim of 
his pursuit, and devotes himself in all sincerity to its realization, though ever 
falling short of it, the name of a religious man can hardly be denied to such 
a man, seeing that whether he know and confess it or not, the ideal is really 
the presence of God within him. But of such a man it is doubtful whether 
he can properly be called a Christian. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 5 3 

narcotic. In illustration of this statement, we may quote the 
striking language of Dean Stanley in his Eastern Church : — 
" In Christianity is forgiveness for every, even the greatest sin ; 
a doctrine, which, according to the manner in which it is pre- 
sented to us, is, indeed, the worst corruption, or the noblest 
boast of the Christian religion. It may be the hateful Anti- 
nomianism, which, in the Protestant Church, has taken shelter 
under the Lutheran doctrine of " justification by faith alone " ; 
in the Roman Catholic Church, under the scholastic doctrine of 
priestly absolution. But it may also be the true doctrine of the 
gospel, the reception of the prodigal son, of the woman who 
was a sinner, and of the thief on the Cross, the doctrine that the 
divine forgiveness is ever at hand as soon as man turns to be 
forgive.:." The law of divine forgiveness could not but be 
recondite and difficult of apprehension, owing to the circum- 
stance that its manifestation in action is contingent on that 
moral and spiritual effort to which human nature is so averse. 
It could only reveal itself fully to one who strove towards per- 
fection, and to secure de facto to his higher nature that suprem- 
acy which belongs to it de jure. And how few are there of 
whom this can be said. But we shall yet endeavour to show 
in the case of Jesus, how such a doctrine could dawn upon the 
mind of humanity, and also, that when received on authority, 
such as his, it would, by the infusion of hope, be calculated to 
rouse the soul from its state of moral inertia, and put new 
vigour into its effort, when already engaged, but hopelessly and 
unsuccessfully, in the Christian struggle. 

We repeat, therefore, that the doctrine of Jesus is autosoteric. 
The one great and special lesson which he enforced was the 
duty of self-abnegation, of self-extrication from evil, the pursuit, 
that is, of the ideal life, stimulated and sustained by the convic- 
tion of the divine forgiveness of our lapses and shortcomings. 
That for which the Jews professed to wait — the help of God — 
was, according to Jesus, already given, already provided, and 
freely laid to hand, viz., the law of the forgiveness of the sins 
that are past, so that nothing was wanting on the part of the in- 
dividual, but that he should enter the strait gate, and take up 
the cross, which, considering that all other conditions were 
satisfied, was pronounced by Jesus to be a light and easy yoke. 
Here, for him, was the supreme proof of the goodness of God, 
and the supreme motive of our love to Him. It is observable, 



154 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that he nowhere insists on the duty of believing in the mercy of 
God. He tells men simply to call God Father. It is, as if 
he took for granted, that when men engage seriously in the 
effort to conform to the requirements of their ideal nature, they 
will naturally and necessarily believe in God's placable char- 
acter ; it seemed to him as if the consciousness of personal 
weakness which that struggle would bring to light, would make 
this view of God so welcome to the individual that it did not 
need to be enforced. 

So much at present for the teaching of Jesus. We proceed 
now to observe that there is not in the synoptists a particle of 
evidence that he started with the belief that he was the pre- 
dicted Messiah, but much to the contrary. At a future stage 
we shall endeavour to point out how that belief may, in the 
sequel, have grown up in his mind, and what an important 
service was thereby rendered to the Christian society. But at 
present we content ourselves with saying that his proclamation 
as to the presence of the kingdom of God was underlaid by the 
thought that a Messiah might or might not come, that come 
when he might, whether soon or late, there was no need for any 
individual to wait for his coming. Men could not tell when he 
would come, men could not hasten his coming ; the time was a 
matter which the Father kept in his own hands, a matter over 
which they had no control, and for that very reason alone, a 
matter of comparative or entire indifference. The first, the im- 
mediate duty incumbent upon all men, to which all else had to 
be postponed, was to exercise the power they had of entering 
the kingdom of heaven which was already open, of making 
themselves free of its privileges, and of securing the highest 
bliss of which their nature was susceptible, a bliss without 
which even the kingdom of their imagination, of their fondest 
hopes, would descend in vain into the midst of them. The 
true, the only kingdom of God was of such a nature that all 
might enter it without delay ; even while the Messiah deferred 
his coming it was open to all who made righteousness their 
first pursuit ; and its coming was not, in the first instance at 
least, an event of national consequence, but of individual ex- 
perience, so that the social life of the nation could be elevated 
only by the elevation of the individuals composing it. 

This certitude had, we doubt not, as already said, been con- 
veyed to him by irrefragable experience ; it was a faith for him 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 155 

which could not be shaken. From the gnomic and parabolic 
form, as well as from the authoritative tone of his teaching, it 
may easily be seen that he was perfectly aware of the immense 
significance of his doctrine, and fully anticipated its great and 
permanent effect on human life. He not only understood the 
religious situation of the time and the hidden needs of humanity, 
but he also knew exactly the contribution which he was making 
to correct, to elucidate, and to exalt the religious idea ; and in 
the conscious possession of an all-important truth for the eleva- 
tion of his kind, he knew himself to be greater than John and 
all the prophets, and, as the Gospels indicate, had no scruple in 
setting aside their words when they came into collision with his 
gospel, or in declaring that he alone knew the will of the 
Father. With all their depth of spiritual insight, the prophets 
had fallen conspicuously short of the highest truth for the guid- 
ance and elevation of human conduct. In attributing' the 
disasters and decadence of Israel to its declension from right- 
eousness, they had devised the means of making the national 
conscience more sensitive, and of awakening the people to a 
consciousness of their moral degradation; but in exhorting 
them to a better life as a means of reviving their political state 
and restoring their prosperity, they incurred the risk of involv- 
ing, if not themselves, yet the great mass of the people, in the 
danger of considering national and individual prosperity as the 
great end and object of desire, and righteousness as only a 
means to that end, and not as an immediate object of desire for 
its own sake ; thus unintentionally and unconsciously removing 
the kingdom of God to a distance, and giving encouragement 
to that evasive tendency which was sufficient to account for the 
lapse of the people into formality and the mere show of 
religion. Could they, like Jesus, have recognized the truth that 
calamities might befall the nation, however righteous it might 
be, and that suffering and persecution might overtake it, not 
merely in spite of, but by reason of, its righteousness (Matth. v. 
10), they might have reached the idea round which they 
fluttered, but on which they never fairly settled, that righteous- 
ness itself was the first and main thing to be possessed of, and 
that all else would be added to those who sought it for its own 
sake; not that even the reign of righteousness would necessarily 
be accompanied by outward prosperity, or inward happiness, 
either for the individual or the people, but that all else, good or 



156 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

evil, would minister to the higher good, to that inner harmony 
of the soul, and to that sense of reconciliation with God which 
are one and the same thing. This was what Jesus taught, and 
to this day it is the central truth of Christianity. We are 
Christians only in so far as we practically recognize and form 
our lives upon it ; it is, indeed, the practical recognition of this 
truth which to this day constitutes the strength of our religion, 
while, with the practical oblivion of it, the heart of Christianity 
grows cold under mere forms and garniture. Other teachers 
may have had glimpses of the same idea, but none ever appre- 
hended it so clearly as Jesus did, no one ever displayed the 
same fidelity to it in life and practice, and no one ever exercised 
the same power of stimulating others to form their lives upon 
it. He alone divined the power of the idea, and used it as a 
lever to move the world. 

A great, but somewhat prejudiced, critic has given it as his de- 
liberate opinion that the words put into the mouth of Jesus by the 
fourth Evangelist, " God is spirit, and they that worship Him 
must worship Him in spirit and in truth," give expression to 
the most distinctive principle in Christianity. To us, it appears, 
that the better authenticated words of Jesus on which we have 
dwelt, " The kingdom of God is within you," or " in the midst 
of you," contain a deeper and more comprehensive truth, of 
which that other is only an inference ; and a truth, too, drawn 
from immediate and profound experience. The meaning of 
these latter words is large, viz., that divine laws were then, and 
ever are, operant in the world of nature and of spirit, even 
though men may be unconscious of the fact that the kingdom 
of God consists in the reign of these laws, and that it is by 
recognizing and conforming to them as the rule and guide of 
life that men become members of that kingdom in the plenary 
sense. We hold that this was the grand disclosure which Jesus 
made to the world, on which his claim to be considered the 
greatest of all the great founders of religion may be chiefly 
rested. What he said was true for all ages and for all 
countries ; but it became true in the highest sense when men 
rose to the knowledge or full consciousness of it ; and, indeed, 
it is only in the human consciousness that this truth did, or 
could, reveal itself. There was nothing but a dim foreshadow- 
ing of it, if even that, in any of the Hebrew legislators and 
prophets. These men did, indeed, discover many of the moral 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 57 

and spiritual laws that are operant in the world ; but to them 
the kingdom of God, so far as they had a conception of it, con- 
sisted of something more, of something beyond the operation 
of such laws, of something visible and external, of something not 
ideal merely, but real. Whereas Jesus proclaimed that there 
was nothing beyond this, nothing higher than this for man to 
look to. And though his view may not have been clearly 
apprehended even by his followers, yet enough of it was 
impressed upon their minds to spiritualize the thoughts of men, 
to refine the religious idea, to consign all rites and ceremonies, 
all external institutions and observances to a subordinate and 
merely ministrant office in the service of religion, and to elevate 
morality, i.e., conformity to eternal, as opposed to mere conven- 
tional and temporary, national and traditional regulations, to 
its supreme place in religion. The disclosure of this to man 
was the achievement of Jesus, which gives him a unique place 
in the history of religion, a position more unique, let us say, 
than that of the discoverer of gravitation in the physical 
sciences. 



CHAPTER VI. 

LEGAL OR PHARISAIC IDEA OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND OF 
THE RELIGIOUS RELATION. 

We have now seen that to express his definite idea of a 
reign of righteousness upon earth, the term " kingdom of God " 
was used by Jesus in a manner accidentally, or by way of 
accommodation to a vague and indefinite idea, which had 
grown up in the course of Jewish history, and that it recom- 
mended itself to him as a means of indicating and preserving 
the continuity of his teaching with the religious ideas then 
current among the Jews. It is obvious that his announcement 
with respect to the kingdom of God, its nearness and its 
character, though it came first in order in his teaching, must, 
in the evolution of his thought, have been preceded by the 
discovery of the spirituality, blessedness, and all sufficiency 
of true righteousness. We proceed, therefore, to observe that 
what was important for all time, and essential to his work of 
reformation, was the new and fuller meaning which he gave to 
the word " righteousness." By so doing he may be said to 
have " set the current and to have formed the standard " of the 
coming age. To this point, therefore, we shall now direct 
special attention. 

The prophets, the poets, and the sages of Israel had laboured 
to impress a higher character on the popular and traditional 
religion of their times, and in so doing had foreshadowed much 
of the teaching of Jesus. But the nation at large seems, even 
in the prophetic age, to have entered but little into their moral 
and spiritual elevation, and to have been slow to follow their 
lead and adopt their views. And after the age of prophecy the 
religion of Israel seems to have retained little trace of its 
influence and rather to have undergone a strange degeneration. 



NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 59 

During this period, in which the synagogue rose and flourished, 
the doctrine of a future life and of a bodily resurrection sank 
deep into the hearts of the people. But it seemed as if, while 
the horizon of humanity was thus widened and expanded, the 
religious life at the same time lost in depth and earnestness; as 
if the people had sought to lighten and mitigate the new burden 
of responsibility thus laid upon them by emptying the law of 
its spiritual contents and reducing its requirement to that of a 
mere mechanical and, therefore, practicable service. 

The external rites and ceremonies of religion owe their origin 
to a spirit of devotion, which seeks in them an expression for 
itself. But these very forms, originally expressive of a spiritual 
reality, are wont to be retained and practised as a mechanical 
substitute after the spirit has fled. It is conceivable, therefore, 
that in the early periods of the history of Israel there may have 
breathed through the forms of its religion a devout spirit which 
may have more or less disappeared for certain periods. In the 
long course of that history the growth may have been towards 
a more moral and spiritual conception of religion ; but this 
general tendency may not have excluded great alternations, 
backward as well as forward movements. And if we accept the 
critical conclusion that the Psalter (to say nothing of the Book 
of Wisdom) was mainly the product of the exile and the post- 
exilian age, we should be inclined to say that the forward 
movement of what is called the prophetic age was prolonged 
beyond the limits of the latter ; but there can be no doubt that 
for several generations before the time of Jesus a backward 
movement had set in. The vice of formalism, against which 
prophets had protested in vain (though not without some 
effect in the earlier post-exilian ages), revived in greater force, 
and with altered aspect, in the later ages of that period, despite 
the prophetic tradition, and called forth the protest of a mightier 
prophet than Israel had ever known. 

The downward and carnalizing tendency exhibited by the 
religion of Israel during this later period was probably much 
promoted by the circumstance already adverted to, viz., that the 
ritual and statutory observances peculiar to it were what after 
all distinguished it most visibly and palpably from the religion 
of surrounding nations, and* that on that very account the loyal 
Israelite (who knew nothing of the principles which now obtain 
in the comparative science of religion, and keenly felt the neces- 



l6o THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

sity of keeping aloof from heathen practices) would seek to 
erect and maintain a barrier betwixt himself and the worshippers 
of other gods by punctilious, unswerving, and ostentatious 
attention to the distinctive outward forms and usages of his 
nation. At former periods of their history, when the rites and 
ceremonies of Israel bore more of a family resemblance to those 
of neighbouring nations, there might exist a feeling that these 
forms were not of essential or paramount importance, and were 
subordinate to the higher duties of morality and religion. But 
in the course of ages, when these rites and ceremonies were 
stereotyped into distinctive and diverging forms, and the divine 
imprimatur, moreover, was stamped upon them by the Levitical 
code, there would grow up the feeling that their observance 
was the true test of fidelity and constituted the true wall of 
partition between the Israelite and the heathen. The cere- 
monial side of religion would, by a natural tendency, rise in 
importance, and its moral aspect would be thrust more and 
more into the background. To maintain distinction in the 
former was so much easier than to preserve superiority in the 
latter. We have also to take into consideration that a people 
accustomed in a hundred ways, and under every variety of 
circumstance, to testify regard to the divine will by sacrifice 
and other outward observance, would also be tempted to sup- 
pose that they might satisfy the moral and spiritual precepts of 
religion by the merely outward observance of them also, even 
when the heart gravitated to the forbidden evil. 

When the Jew of those times spoke of righteousness — of 
that manner of life and conduct which the law enjoined, it 
was of quite another sort from that which Jesus, as we shall 
find, sought to enforce. That section of the people, indeed, 
which in the New Testament is represented by publicans and 
sinners, would feel themselves excluded from a kingdom to 
which righteousness in any sense was the key. Their lives 
were, or were supposed to be, regulated by no rule or idea 
whatever of righteousness, and the discourses of Jesus would 
be felt by them to be a call to take an earnest view of life — 
to renounce pleasure, or expediency, or self-interest, as their 
rule of action, and to conform their conduct to a principle or 
law which was divine, and independent of individual caprice, 
or self-will, the best or only apparent examples of such con- 
formity which they had hitherto seen being the Scribes and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 6 I 

Pharisees, who were regarded as models of the religious life, 
and as the accredited expounders of the law. But Jesus had 
to deal not with those only whose lives were thus framed 
on no ideal, but mainly with those whose lives were con- 
structed on a false ideal. What he undertook was to challenge 
the false and evasive Pharisaic ideal : to break its authority, 
and to erect the true ideal or standard of life in its place. 
His primary object, no doubt, was to impart to his followers 
the doctrine which he had drawn from his own spiritual 
experience ; but he could hardly broach that doctrine, or 
make any statement of it, however simple, except in language 
antithetic to that of the Pharisees. In a secondary sense, 
therefore, his teaching was eminently polemical and destruc- 
tive in order that it might be constructive and truly creative, 
and rescue religion and morality from that tendency to 
degeneration into which the leaders of the people had fallen. 
He expressed this view of his mission, and sought to impress 
it on all who listened to him, in that striking sentence, which 
was the complement of his injunction, to seek first the kingdom 
of God and His righteousness ; and which, along with it, must 
have been the refrain of all his teaching — viz., " Except your 
righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and 
Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven." 
There was a danger that even publicans and sinners, the lost 
sheep of the house of Israel, if they were awakened to greater 
earnestness, might yet fall into the mistake of forming their lives 
on the Pharisaic model ; and for their sakes it was necessary, 
as well as for those who had embraced the Pharisaic life, to 
declare with emphasis that such a life gave no title to the 
kingdom of heaven. He had to make manifest to men's 
consciences that the Pharisaic ideal was too low in its 
pitch, and too narrow in its range ; and to place in contrast 
with it a better form of righteousness. To introduce a 
higher standard than the Pharisaic was thus a main object of 
his teaching ; and even at the present day, it is by contrasting 
and comparing the righteousness which he inculcated with that 
which was taught and practised by the Pharisees, that we may- 
best understand the real nature and the central principle of 
the former. 

Whether the polemical and simply thetical elements of the 
teaching of Jesus were contemporaneous, or whether the polem- 
ic 



1 62 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

ical element only emerged after Pharisaic opposition had declared 
itself, it is impossible to tell. The synoptic Gospels do not 
afford us the means of determining this question, for it is quite 
manifest that in them the connection and order in which Jesus 
uttered his sayings are not preserved. These have unques- 
tionably undergone a process of mixture and rearrangement, 
either at the hands of the Evangelists themselves in compiling 
their Gospels, or during the formation of the traditions from 
which the Evangelists drew their materials. But if we may risk 
a conjecture we should say that, as it was the dissatisfaction of 
Jesus with Pharisaic doctrine (and not simply with Pharisaic 
practice, as was the case with John), which prompted him to 
step forth as a teacher, a certain polemical element may have 
characterized his teaching from the first ; though it is natural 
to suppose that, towards the end of his ministry, the tone of 
polemical acerbity would become more pronounced and em- 
phatic. Comp. Matth. xvi. I 2. 

We make no allusion here to Essenism. The Essene com- 
munities which flourished in Palestine at that time seem indeed 
to have observed a rule of life of a more spiritual kind, and 
otherwise favourably distinguished from the Pharisaic ; and it 
has been maintained or suggested by some writers, that Jesus 
may in early life have been a member of one of these com- 
munities, and been much indebted for his higher views to an 
acquaintance with their usages and tenets. There is no necessity 
to deny the possibility of his association with these fraternities, 
though no record of it, and no allusion to it, however remote, 
has been preserved in the Gospels. But no impulse, and no 
enlightenment, which Jesus could have derived from this quarter, 
could explain or account for his view of the better righteousness, 
which was the fulcrum of his teaching. Notwithstanding the 
many parallelisms between Essenism and Christianity, it is a 
great exaggeration to regard the latter as a direct development 
of the former. The differences between them are fundamental. 
The Essenes had none of the hopeful buoyancy of the religion 
of Jesus ; they did not even aspire to be the salt of the earth, 
but only to escape the evil that was in the world or coming 
upon it, by shunning contact and intercourse with it. The 
development of such a system could never have led to the 
freedom and hopefulness, the universalism and vitality, which 
are acknowledged features of Christianity. The aloofness from 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 63 

common life which these sectaries maintained,'* 1 the dualistic 
element of their system of thought, their asceticism, and the 
rigidity of their ritual and their sabbatism placed a wide interval 
between their standpoint and that of Jesus. And we may rest 
assured that his great advance beyond the popular and Pharisaic 
religion of the time cannot be accounted for by his acquaintance 
with their views and practice. We have, therefore, to explain 
the development in his mind in some other way. 

Pharisaism we regard as only the concentrated spirit, the 
more rigid form or the " superlative " of the religion common 
among the Jewish people in that age ; the latter was but a mild 
or lax form of Pharisaic legalism, and formed the atmosphere 
which Jesus breathed in his earlier years. We conceive that he 
arrived at his evangelical standpoint in morals and religion, 
partly by an independent study of the old prophetic literature, 
and partly by the reaction of a profound religious instinct 
against the very system of legalism, through which it had, up 
to a certain point, been trained. 

Jerusalem was the headquarters or stronghold of Pharisaism : 
in remote outlying Galilee Pharisaism only manifested itself in 
a modified form. Had Jesus never made an excursion beyond 
the limits of Galilee the probability is that the inherent vice of 
Judaism might never have revealed itself to his mind. But that 
was not the case. The synoptists, indeed, mention his final 
visit to Jerusalem as the only one which he paid to it during 
his public ministry : but in the years before he began to teach 
he must often have visited the holy city, and have had the 
opportunity of observing Pharisaism full blown and, so to speak, 
rampant. And these visits to Jerusalem may have had the 
same effect upon him, in opening his eyes to the true nature of 
Pharisaism — the orthodox Judaism of the day — as the visit to 
Rome had upon Luther, in opening his eyes to the scandals 
and abuses of the Papal system. The religious life in Galilee 
might not be very active or very spiritual ; but the distance 
between the outward show and the reality might not be very 

* It may be that this fundamental defect in Essenism suggested the ex- 
hortation addressed by Jesus to his disciples, in Matth. v. 15, 16, " Let your 
light shine before men." Such an exhortation was not needed, as against 
the Pharisaism of the day. As against that, the exhortations of quite the 
opposite kind, in ch. vi., were directed : " Take heed that ye do not your 
alms before men," etc. 



164 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

obtrusive ; and a loving charitable spirit might be able to hope 
the best, and to believe that the outward forms gave expression 
to an underlying spirit of genuine devotion. In Jerusalem, on 
the other hand, the unreality was too patent to escape the 
penetrating eye of Jesus, and would produce a revulsion in his 
mind which would carry him on to the conception of a higher 
and purer service. 

The confusion and co-ordination, in theory and in practice, of 
law absolute or spiritual, and law positive or statutory, the cause 
or effect of the unreality here referred to, was not confined to 
Judaism and Pharisaism. It was, and still is in some measure, 
common to all nations and all religions. It is, therefore, con- 
ceivable that a similar reaction might have occurred in other 
lands, as indeed seems to have been the case in India under the 
influence of Buddha. And as bearing on this possibility, it may 
be remarked that the specially anti-Judaic aspect of Christianity, 
under which it is presented by St. Paul, was, as will yet appear, 
ultimately, that is, in the post-Pauline period, quietly let fall as 
something unessential or even misleading. But probably the 
error in theory and practice, to which reference is here made, 
was carried out more systematically and to greater lengths in 
Judaea than elsewhere. And the reaction against it which 
occurred there was also more emphatic and permanent in its 
results. The conditions there were peculiarly helpful to such 
an issue. The ground was there prepared. The Hebrew pro- 
phets, with whose writings Jesus was familiar, had uttered and 
placed upon record a powerful protest against the ceremonial- 
ism and externality of the national worship ; only they had not 
sufficient mental force and insight to erect a barrier against it, 
and to enunciate with emphasis the distinctive principle of a 
higher cult. But this was what Jesus was able to supply. He 
inherited their thought, and started from the ground which 
they occupied ; and, in the announcement that the kingdom of 
God was within men, he effected a further and final advance, 
by which religion was raised to a still higher level. 

The Pharisaic righteousness, to the consideration of which we 
now turn (under the guidance chiefly of Wellhausen), consisted 
in the evvo/j-o^ (Sicocris, the regulation of life, to its minutest 
details, by the statutory enactments of the written and oral law, 
which was believed to have been given by special privilege and 
illumination to Moses and the other ancients of the people. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 1 65 

By the punctilious observance of these rules and statutes, the 
Jew was supposed to show his respect for the divine will, and to 
conciliate the divine favour. This was the whole duty and the 
whole religion of those who " waited for the consolation of 
Israel." According to such a view, the autonomy of man's 
nature was wholly lost sight of. In all questions as to conduct 
the Jew was taught not to look within ; not to consult the 
inward oracle, his own sense of right and wrong ; but to have 
recourse to the law and to the testimony, as these were authori- 
tatively interpreted by the scribes and teachers, and to these 
alone. No room was left for the function of conscience (indeed 
it has been remarked that conscience is a word " strange to the 
Old Testament ") or for an ideal of life, in the proper sense of 
the word. The conception of a better life than the actual or 
average one could hardly be said to have a place in Jewish 
thought. Conformity to the statute was a mere opus, beyond 
which there was no aim in life, no thought of elevating the 
individual character, of ameliorating the social environment, or 
of entering upon a course of self-discipline for the purification 
and improvement of the inner man. Attention was confined to 
the duties positively enjoined, while little or no regard was paid 
to the cultivation of the corresponding virtues. The statute by 
which life was regulated was satisfied by a mechanical routine 
and outward compliance, which being practicable to those 
who were versed in its terms, seemed to them to obviate all call 
and necessity for repentance and a change of heart, and to 
justify that self-righteous tone, and that superciliousness of 
sentiment and behaviour which characterized the Pharisees. 
When, through ignorance or inadvertence, the statute was 
violated, expiations were prescribed for every such occasion. It 
was only when the commandment was sinned against, " with a 
high hand," that is, with presumption and premeditation, that 
such expiations lost their efficacy, and the duties of repentance 
and restitution were supposed to come into force. But it is 
easy to see that the self-righteous Pharisee could easily explain 
away, to his own satisfaction, all such aggravations, and ascribe 
a venial and expiable character to every transgression of the 
statute, so that the duties of repentance, and of a thorough 
change of conduct, might be kept out of sight or evaded. The 
statute embraced the whole outward life, and enclosed it in a 
network of observances ; but the affections and sympathies of 



1 66 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the heart might neither be exercised nor acted upon by its 
fulfilment. And whatever may have been the case in the best 
ages of the commonwealth, or whatever may be the case among 
the Jews of the present day, it would seem that the tendency to 
mere formal observance was fully developed among the Phari- 
sees of the time of Jesus. The show of mere outward respect 
to the will of God which these expositors of the legal system 
were able to keep up, and thereby to mould the practice of the 
great mass of the people, lent to them that character of hypo- 
crisy with which as a class they were chargeable, though, no 
doubt, individuals were free of this taint. 

In the Mosaic Code no distinction was made between moral, 
civil, and ceremonial enactments. All alike were clothed with 
the same extraneous authority, and were held to be of equal 
obligation. And though in the earlier post-exilian period the 
effect of this co-ordination might be to give a moral pathos to 
ceremonial and social observances, the effect of it had grown to 
be the very reverse in the time of Jesus. Even the moral 
observances had in his time contracted a formal and mechanical 
character. On the other hand, there had been a growing 
tendency to expand the ceremonial requirements, and to swell 
their number by the addition of sacrificial, purificatory, sabbatic, 
and liturgical regulations, of which Moses and the prophets 
knew nothing. And we should not be far wrong perhaps if we 
affirmed that practically, if unconsciously, the ceremonial obser- 
vances were practised as a sort of atonement in general for the 
breach and infraction of the moral requirements ; just as the 
ritual and technicalities of worship are apt to be among our- 
selves, with this difference, however, that in Judaea this perver- 
sion received countenance from the example and teaching of 
the highest authorities in such matters, while it only lingers now 
as a survival or superstition among the unreformed and ill- 
instructed in Christian lands. The value thus attached, more 
or less unconsciously, to ritual and ceremonial services, was the 
motive for their multiplication, and gave rise to the feeling, 
which expressed itself in the question of the rich young man in 
the Gospels, "What good thing (more) shall I do?" For, how- 
ever punctilious the evvoinos /S/coo-*?, and however close the net- 
work which it threw around the life, it could never altogether 
satisfy even the most inactive conscience ; something more was 
still in demand, and that something was sought for in the pre- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 67 

scription by authority of some new observance, to afford a 
means or opportunity of showing a more than commonplace 
devotion ; a tendency which we may see in the sectaries of the 
present day, in their efforts to outbid the more regulated and 
canonical observances of the established churches. A certain 
definite observance and rule of action thus came, in the course 
of ages, to be sanctioned or prescribed for every imaginable 
situation or emergency in life, and for every omission or neglect 
of duty. The observance of legal forms, secundum legem agere, 
became the great business of life; something of the kind had to 
be attended to every hour of the day ; all common offices had 
to be performed in a prescribed mode, so that practically no act 
of life was indifferent ; the middle space between what was 
lawful and what was unlawful, between what was profane and 
what was religious, between the clean and the unclean, ceased 
to exist, or tended with every generation to become more and 
more narrow. It was no trifle to keep in mind the computed 
6 1 3 precepts of the written law, and the much greater number 
of the unwritten or consuetudinary law. And religion, as thus 
conceived, had to be studied like a profession and practised like 
any intellectual or manual occupation. Every religion, not 
excepting Christianity, has exhibited the same tendency to 
reduce itself to a mere bodily exercise, to remove the life from 
the jurisdiction of conscience, and to atone by stability and 
uniformity for the lack of spontaneity and vitality. 

The endless multiplication of legal provisions, of which we 
have explained the cause and origin, had also the effect of 
throwing the direction of the people in religious matters into 
the hands of learned castes, the Scribes and Pharisees, who had 
made the law their peculiar study, and had also to some un- 
known extent elaborated its details. The acquaintance of these 
men with the provisions of the law gave them a " lordship " 
(Mark x. 42) over the great mass of the people, whose ignorance 
of the law was accounted as a " curse " ; and the study of these 
provisions, which thus became the employment of their lives, 
was also stimulated by the very convenient doctrine that in 
point of merit it was co-ordinate with their observance. One 
of the most liberal and enlightened of the Rabbins, near the 
time of Jesus, is recorded to have declared that a layman, i.e., a 
man outside of these classes, and therefore unskilled in the law, 
could not be religious, inasmuch as such a man could not know 



1 68 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

what was sin and what was not, and therefore could not but 
fall into sin and contract uncleanness. Those classes, which had 
made the law their study, and knew its provisions, were the 
" wise and prudent " (Matth. xi. 25), who trusted in their superior 
knowledge, and it was they whom Jesus had in his eye when, 
in the spirit of true humanity, he thanked his heavenly Father 
that it was not to them but to the poor and ignorant, the babes 
and sucklings, that he had revealed the things of the kingdom. 
No words could better show his sense of the immense revolu- 
tion which he hoped to accomplish in the religious attitude 
and judgment of mankind. 

To any one who had the faintest tincture of the prophetic 
spirit, or, we may say, the faintest foretaste of the evangelic 
spirit, such regulations, by reason of their complexity and 
multiplication, could not but be burdensome and oppressive in 
the highest degree, and appear to be a superfluous and vexatious 
byplay of the religious life, an arbitrary and capricious imposi- 
tion by a hard and ungracious master. But to the Pharisee 
they were easy and tolerable, because, for the weightier matters 
of the law — justice, mercy, and truth — they substituted obser- 
vances which were less contrary to his self will. True they 
destroyed his spontaneity of action, and converted duty into a 
matter of calculation, but they appeased and soothed his 
conscience, and by supplying him with a ready answer to all 
questions of casuistry, they relieved him from the pain of that 
self-discipline which largely consists in the faithful and candid 
application of moral principles to the conduct of life. 

These regulations laid a yoke upon the spirit, bnt not the 
yoke of true religion. Their observance only gave to life a 
religious air, by filling it with quasi-religious transactions, which 
were a ministry of the letter, but not of the spirit, of the divine 
law. It is true that, in the circumstances in which the people 
were placed, under the jealous suspicion and hostility of unsym- 
pathizing polytheistic nations, the open manifestation of punc- 
tilious outward fidelity to the law, could only be maintained by 
a great devotion, which, to do them justice, they seldom shrank 
from ; but their devotion was largely prompted by national 
pride and assumption, and by the desire to propitiate the God 
of their fathers. At bottom it was the offspring of fear, and of 
an uncharitable and mercenary, grudging and exclusive habit of 
mind. Under the influence of such mixed feelings, the Jews 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 69 

might be, and often were, blameless and devout in outward 
deportment, and imbued with a spirit of awe and reverence 
before the unseen Power ; capable of manifesting the depth and 
sincerity of their convictions by heroic martyrdom for the faith, 
while manifestly, or even ostentatiously, destitute of the finer 
sensibilities of the heart, of charity and sympathy, as well as 
of that sincerity, which consists in the harmony of the outward 
and inward life, and sheds a beauty and a grace over all. It 
was of a religion such as theirs that that aphorism of a great 
observer holds true, that they who give themselves up to it are 
apt to use it as a stalking horse, and to fall into hypocrisy. 

The religion of the Pharisee failed entirely to discipline the 
individual will, and had no tendency to realize the idea of a 
more perfect society. His observances brought him into no 
sympathetic contact with other men. It has been said of him 
that he could see the wrongs of which the world is full, and 
have no desire and make no effort to right them ; that he could 
be brought face to face with suffering, and misery, and ignor- 
ance, and stretch forth no hand for their relief; he could see 
the man lying wounded on the road, and pass by on the other 
side. It has even been said, with a certain degree of truth, that, 
for the fulfilment (satisfaction) of the Pharisaic sense of duty, 
the existence of society was hardly required. And yet, further, 
it was hardly a recognized part of the Pharisee's righteousness 
to extend the spirit of law to the control of the inner life, or to 
make it his aim to contribute to the establishment of conditions 
more favourable to the growth of the kingdom of God. To do 
what was enjoined in the statute, but to consider the issue as 
the affair of God, and to leave it coldly in His hands was his 
mental attitude ; and his strict legality was combined with a spirit 
of comparative indifference to all human, and even to all national 
interests, except the one interest involved in the coming of the 
kingdom of God, which, he believed, he could neither help nor 
hinder, neither hasten nor retard. This negation of all higher 
aim could not be wholly unfelt by the Pharisees themselves ; 
and hence they threw themselves with all the more enthusiasm 
on the faith that, provided they propitiated God by the painful, 
servile, and fruitless compliance with His statutory require- 
ments, He would be constrained or compelled to work for them 
and to fulfil His promises made long ages before to the fathers. 
They expected that the kingdom for which they waited would 



170 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

be advanced and established, not by any works of theirs, but 
simply by some mysterious, sudden, and unknown work of God > 
which might be regarded in the light of an extraneous reward 
for their faith and patience ; but in no sense as the necessary 
result and outcome of their service. 

The negative form of the Decalogue was the necessary result 
of the fact that, being a politico-religious code of morals, it 
could only prescribe the minimum requirement for securing the 
stability of civil life ; or it was, perhaps, yet more the result of 
the limited development in that age of the moral sense. Its 
very form helped to encourage the notion that all righteousness 
might be fulfilled by abstinence from overt transgressions, and 
from flagrant violations of the duties enjoined ; that a formal 
and mechanical observance of the statute would suffice to 
satisfy its requirements in its religious, no less than in its civil 
aspect ; and that God did not look too inquisitorially into the 
inner life, but was satisfied by the consecration to Him of the 
outward life. If men did not avow a belief of this kind in so 
many words, they at least lived and acted for the most part as 
if it was their belief. The leaders of religious thought and 
practice paid tithes of mint and anise and cummin, but omitted 
the weightier matters of the law. They stopped short of the 
adulterous act, but allowed the eye and the imagination to rove 
abroad. And this strictness of outward observance had an im- 
posing effect upon the people at large ; and put out of counten- 
ance those feelings of natural piety, and of a more spiritual 
religion, which could not be wholly extirpated. It was not easy 
for any one to call in question the sincerity of those solemn 
religionists ; to discredit their teaching and practice was a thank- 
less and a dangerous task. Only one could venture to make the 
attempt who was above suspicion ; who had sounded the deeps 
of man's moral nature ; who had discerned the utter worthlessness 
and pettiness of mere outward homage to the divine will, and 
was besides sure of himself ; ready to brave all, and to stake 
life itself in the conflict which he was sure to provoke. And 
just such an one was Jesus. From the first he set himself 
earnestly to challenge the errors of the Pharisees in doctrine 
and in practice ; to discredit their authority, to destroy their 
prestige, and to substitute a true ideal of righteousness for their 
false ideal. The outwardness and formality ; the negative and 
propitiatory character of the Pharisaic righteousness was what 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I/I 

constituted that legality of service, which is opposed to the true 
evangelic service ; the one rendered mercenarily with an eye to 
reward ; the other rendered freely as an act of thanksgiving to 
the Author of all good. 

Not the least doubtful effect of the co-ordination of the cere- 
monial with the -moral ordinances in the Mosaic law, was that it 
opened up a sphere of religious activity, apart from the sphere 
of moral activity ; that is, a sphere of activity devoid of any 
direct practical aim or bearing on the inner life ; a sphere "upon 
which the religious forces and emotions are apt to be wholly 
misdirected, as, indeed, was the case in later Judaism. Some- 
thing of the same kind has taken place also in orthodox or 
dogmatic Christianity; the only difference, and that a great one, 
being that, in the latter case, the separate religious, emotional 
activity has been made to revolve round the person of the ideal 
Christ, and, through sympathy with his person, has been kept 
in close and indissoluble connection with the graces and 
humanities of life, of which that ideal figure was the most 
resplendent example — the symbol of the most perfect life which 
humanity has been able to conceive. 

The righteousness of the Pharisee involved the idea that his 
whole life ought to be consecrated to God, in the sense that no 
act whatever could be morally indifferent or merely innocent, but, 
by being performed in a manner prescribed by divine authority, 
should have a character of holiness impressed upon it. The 
effect of that idea was seen in that air of sanctimonious gravity 
which distinguished him. But the service which he actually 
rendered was that of the outer life only. It was a stipulated 
service by which he commuted for the unreserved devotion of 
his whole man. There was in it an evidence of the dread and 
aversion with which men are apt to shrink before the breadth 
and depth of the divine law as written on the heart and inter- 
preted by the honest and enlightened conscience. Ordinances 
which rest on mere authority give men an excuse for not 
scanning too intently the law of the spirit of life written within : 
enabling them to keep up a show of deference to the will of their 
divine Author, and to avoid the appearance of breaking away 
altogether from His will. There was no wonder that prophets 
should express more than a doubt of the divine authorship of 
such ordinances, or that Jesus himself should have declared 
that one at least of the Mosaic regulations had been given for 



172 TIIH NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the hardness of men's hearts, and thereby have lent countenance 
to the conjecture that in his judgment many other such had 
been given for the same or other inferior considerations, rather 
than for their intrinsic and eternal validity. But the time was 
come, he implied, when all that had been done by way of con- 
cession to human weakness or obduracy should be disowned or 
rescinded, when it should be made known that religion should 
be pure and undefined, that righteousness should be its own 
reward, and should be seen to be in itself the element which 
constituted the kingdom of God, the perfect form of society on 
earth. 

Let it here be observed that the characteristic features of the 
Pharisaic spirit, as now depicted, were not entirely due to the 
abuse or perversion of the Mosaic law, but were in some 
measure due also to the intrinsic nature of that law itself, con- 
sidered as the establishment of a covenant relation between 
God and Israel, and as the summary of the mutual obligations 
of these two contracting parties. The law and the covenant 
might be regarded as the manifestation of God's free and 
distinguishing favour for Israel ; and so long as this aspect of 
them was kept in view the effect would be to ennoble and 
spiritualize the minds of the people. But recent investigations 
into synagogal theology, by Weber and others, have brought 
out the curious fact that in the pre-Christian age this capital 
aspect of the covenant was in a great measure lost sight of, and 
that quite another construction of it had gradually gained the 
upper hand. The idea of an eternal law founded in the nature 
of God and man, which the tradition of the Sinaitic legislation 
tended to obscure, was dropped out of mind, and it came to be 
thought that God had given the law from Sinai, in order that 
Israel might have the means, not otherwise possessed, of dis- 
playing its regard to God's will, and so of acquiring a claim 
upon His favour. Naturally it followed that the more precepts 
the law could be made to embrace, or to imply, the greater 
merit could the Israelite accumulate. Hence arose the endless 
multiplication of legal prescriptions ; hence, too, the idea that a 
certain reward was annexed to the observance of each separate 
precept, and that a meritorious act of this kind must precede 
each proof of goodwill on the part of God. It was with this 
idea in his view, of the relation between himself and God, that 
the Pharisee paid scrupulous attention to the letter of the law, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 73 

not merely to propitiate God, but even to lay God under 
obligation, and to make Him the debtor. The result of such 
ideas could only be the mercenary practice of almsgiving with- 
out chanty ; of prayer without devotion ; of fasting without 
penitence ; and of a religion in which austerity and sancti- 
moniousness, ostentation, self-complacency, censoriousness, and 
hypocrisy were distinguishing features. The evangelical idea 
of the relation between God and man, which had begun to 
dawn in the prophetic age, was supplanted by the ultra-legal 
idea ; and it was, we believe, the settling down of this latter 
into its rigid Pharisaic form, with the fatal consequences now 
depicted, which called forth the indignant protest of Jesus. His 
sense of this crying evil was what prompted him to that great 
enterprise, which was to transplant, or, to use a Paulinistic 
expression (Col. i. 13), to translate his countrymen out of 
the legal into the new or evangelic religious relation, and so to 
spiritualize and raise the standard of life. And we hold this to 
be, next to monotheism, the greatest step ever taken in the 
development of religious thought ; enough, in fact, however 
imperfectly apprehended, to account for all that followed in the 
wake of his teaching ; for all that influence of Christianity 
upon human life, which has kept pace with the development of 
the moral sense, and with the growing complexity of the social 
relations. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE EVANGELIC IDEA AS TAUGHT BY JESUS. 

To the externality — the mechanical and mercenary nature of 
the righteousness affected and practised by the Pharisees — 
Jesus opposed the demand of inwardness and spirituality as 
being essential to the righteousness of God and constitutive of 
its reality. This is a conception which runs through the 
Sermon on the Mount, and all his teaching which has come 
down to us. He commenced his discourse on the mount by 
affirming the blessedness, i.e., the membership in the kingdom 
of God, not of those who punctiliously observed certain outward 
and statutory forms, but of those who were imbued with certain 
inward dispositions, such as poverty of spirit, meekness, and 
purity of heart. But his doctrine on this point received its 
most gnomic and striking expression in that memorable saying 
of his, " Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, 
but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man." 
" Those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from 
the heart, and they defile the man." These words are an 
example of the literary or popular form of speech, inasmuch as 
they are charged with a meaning, and thrown out at an object 
or idea, to which they do not give full and adequate expression. 
They imply the comparative or absolute worthlessness of the 
regulations laid down in the oral and written law respecting 
meats and drinks, and, by parity of reason, are suggestive of 
the relative unimportance of many or all of those ceremonial 
observances, to which the people were taught by the Scribes to 
attach such value. If Jesus did not go the length of making a 
categorical statement to this effect, it was probably due in part 
to the necessity of proceeding piecemeal, and opening up his 



NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 75 

views by degrees ; and in part to his anxiety to deal tenderly 
with a system under which, with all its defects, the religious 
sentiment had been nurtured in Israel. Only the more obvious 
and crying abuses of the legal system called forth his indigna- 
tion, and drew from him such depreciatory utterances as the 
above, which admitted of a general and far-reaching application. 
Such sentences, and others of a like import, suffice to show 
that he recognized and laid stress on that distinction between 
moral and ceremonial requirements, which Scribes and Phari- 
sees deemed of no practical consequence, or were careful to 
ignore : that he regarded mere bodily defilement as not in- 
volving the soul in impurity ; and they led up, or came near 
to the principle, that there is no religious or moral obligation 
to avoid what does not defile the soul, or to practise what does 
not purify the life ; and that such avoidances and such practices 
are neither binding on the conscience nor acceptable to God. 
Nor can it be anywhere gathered from his teaching, that he 
contemplated the possibility that ascetic practices and penances 
would afterwards be enjoined by authority derived from him. 

The righteousness, then, which he demanded of his disciples 
excelled that of the Pharisees, in respect of its inwardness and 
spirituality. It was the righteousness of the whole man — of 
the hidden man of the heart, as well as of the outward deport- 
ment — making itself apparent on the surface of the life, but 
having its seat in the life below the life, or in that which con- 
stitutes the inmost self of the individual. According to 
Jesus, it is a man's disposition, the state of a man's heart 
generally, which decides his moral worth. The true value of 
an act is determined by the intention with which it is per- 
formed, and the motive which inspires it. The guilt of the 
overt and palpable form of evil is already contracted by the 
lusting of the heart, even though the deed, which is the natural 
consummation of it, may, for lack of opportunity, or from the 
presence of some inferior and countervailing motive, not be 
actually committed. This doctrine strikes at the root of evil, 
cuts off every evasion of the commandment, and attaches the 
stigma of affectation, insincerity, or hypocrisy, to all conduct 
which is not an index of the inner life of the soul. It also 
enlarges the sphere of religion incalculably, by bringing it into 
connection with this inner life, and placing the whole man 
under the horizon and surveillance of law. The doctrine is, 



176 Till-; NATURAL HISTORY OF 

besides, so radical and far-reaching, that it may be said to have 
involved all that followed in his teaching. Manifestly it tended 
to undermine the authority of the Scribes and Pharisees, be- 
cause it proposed a standard which, while commending itself to 
the moral sense of the people, was more exacting than that 
which could be gathered from the teaching and practice of 
these men, and exhibited them as taking credit for a righteous- 
ness which only satisfied a lower standard. 

We are far from claiming absolute originality for this — the 
fundamental and root doctrine of Jesus. For, not to mention 
the thinkers among the Gentiles, with whose ethical doctrines 
there is no evidence of his being conversant, we acknowledge 
that the prophets of Israel had said much that was like it — 
much that approached it, though never so distinctly, so con- 
sciously, so emphatically, or in forms of language so level and 
impressive to popular apprehension. The Law itself had said, 
" Thou shalt not covet," though not perhaps in the sense which 
St. Paul put upon it, as a prohibition of concupiscence in the 
mere conception. And a prophetic voice had said of God, 
that He " desired truth in the inward parts " ; and we can see 
the same thought of inwardness struggling to find expression 
in prophetic ages, only to be lost sight of again under the rule 
of the priestly and learned castes. Yet, as we cannot suppose 
that Jesus was guided to his deeper insight into the nature of 
righteousness by any special illumination, neither do we require 
to regard him as a mere repristinator or servile restorer of 
past thought. He reproduced it in a new and transfigured 
form, and gave heightened prominence and significance to 
those very features of the religious idea which had been 
forgotten or obscured by the commentators of intermediate 
times. If he was, as no doubt he was, indebted to the sugges- 
tive language of a prophetic generation long asleep, he was 
yet able, by native insight, to apply to that language a search- 
ing criticism, and by comparing it with the ideas and usages 
prevalent in his own day, to discern the deep significance of 
those very elements of the prophetic teaching which had been 
lost to view, and to reduce them to a definite and gnomic ex- 
pression which the ingenuity or dulness of later theologians 
has never to this day been able wholly to obscure. This was 
a work of the highest genius, but one too which could never 
have been achieved except for the labours of preceding com- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 7/ 

mentators — the happiest result of which may have been to 
reveal to the penetrating eye of Jesus the defects of prophetic 
teaching — the points at which the- prophets had failed, not for 
want of fidelity, but for lack of discernment, to ^i\c forth a 
more certain sound. Simply by giving due, i.e., absolute signi- 
ficance to elements which had never received a prominence 
commensurate to their importance, he brought into view the 
religion of the heart, and presented to the faith of man an 
ideal so plain that it could dispense with the aids of repre- 
sentation by symbol and ceremony, and find its legitimate 
and necessary fruit in a pure and ever purer form of the 
common life of man. 

We may even venture to go further, and say, that it was 
necessary that that formality, to which there was from the 
first a natural tendency in Judaism, should develop itself into 
utmost rigidity, in order to disclose to the mind of Jesus its 
full remoteness from true religion, and to evoke in his mind 
that strong revulsion towards the recognition of the inward 
aspect of religion of which his whole doctrine gave evidence. 
It has been truly said that " flagrant evils cure themselves by 
being flagrant " ; and in the light of this observation we may 
say that Pharisaism made Jesus possible. The religious in- 
stinct in him was strong enough, and luminous enough, not to 
be vanquished by the Pharisaic element into which he was 
born — to withstand the common tendency to throw the inner 
side of religion into the background, and to recognize and 
react against that flagrant evil. Or we may say that his 
doctrine, while it was a reaction against Pharisaism, was the 
development of Jewish religion in its best days, and that it 
emphasized a side of religion which prophets had recognized 
and embraced in their view of it, but had not fully mastered, 
or sufficiently accentuated. By supplying a remedy to this 
great defect, Jesus threw a new light over all, and effected a 
complete transformation of the religious idea. If this be a 
just view of what he accomplished, some may be inclined to 
dispute its claim to be regarded as a work of transcendent 
genius, seeing that the wonder is, that the idea of inwardness, 
after dawning on the prophetic mind, should ever have fallen 
into abeyance, or that a people who believed in God's know- 
ledge of the secrets of men's hearts, should ever have forgotten 
that He could be satisfied with no homage short of that of the 

M 



I 78 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

whole man. Be this as it may, the inwardness which he 
declared to be an essential and distinguishing mark of true 
righteousness, came as a new element, to produce unheard-of 
changes in pre-existing thought and life relations. His doc- 
trine must have come upon his disciples with a shock of 
surprise — not, indeed, as being absolutely new to them, or to 
other men, for many had surmised or suspected it before his 
day ; but it was now for the first time recognized in all its 
significance for the higher education of man. Jesus made the 
doctrine his own, and associated it with his person for all 
coming time, by being the first to lay emphasis on it as a sine 
qua non of morality, and assigning to it its proper fundamental 
position in the system of religious thought and practice. 

We do not admit, either, that it detracts from the originality 
of Jesus, that many before him had forecasts of his funda- 
mental ideas, or that he arrived at these by being specially 
inspired, or endowed with a nature above the human. The 
minds of men are almost infinitely graduated in their several 
capacities, the difference in degree often seeming to pass into 
a difference in kind — a fact which is expressed by saying that 
one man has talent while another has genius. It may be laid 
down as a general maxim, that the truth which can appeal to 
the common order of minds will disclose itself to some mind 
of exceptional discernment. And it may be doubted whether 
there is a single truth relevant to human nature and its needs, 
which the human mind, by individual or collective effort, has 
not the power of excogitating for itself — not always, it may be, 
by syllogistic methods, or mere logical deduction from the 
accumulated treasures of the past, but sometimes by a vital 
and spiritual process and guidance, beyond that of the under- 
standing — by the breathing of a new spirit and a fuller life 
into pre-existing forms of thought. " The imagination," it has 
been said, " which shudders at the hell of Dante, is the same 
faculty, weaker in degree, which called that picture into being." 
And in like manner, we may say that the spiritual faculty, 
to which that great idea appeals, out of which Christianity has 
sprung, is the same (only weaker in degree) as that which 
rescued it from obscurity, and placed it fully before the human 
consciousness. Besides the historical and extraneous conditions 
amid which Jesus appeared, we must, indeed, also take into 
account that depth of insight, and that fidelity to conviction 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 79 

which belonged to his personal endowment, before we can 
satisfactorily explain his discovery. Those conditions, as 
already said, were substantially the same for multitudes of his 
contemporaries, while he alone, of all these multitudes, pene- 
trated to the nature of true righteousness. We may not be 
able to trace, with any approach to certainty, the path by which 
he rose to his grand convictions, but we may conceive that 
there were secret, unfrequented avenues by which that faithful 
heart and that pondering soul might arrive at them. 

And yet, in propounding the necessity of the spiritual 
element, Jesus was not so engrossed or pre-occupied by his 
discovery as to go to the opposite extreme. He did not 
become one-sided, and overlook the importance of the outward 
fulfilment of all righteousness. It was the righteousness of 
the whole man which he inculcated, and for him the outward 
act, in its own time and place, was as necessary and as indis- 
pensable as the will and the inclination to do good. He 
said expressly, that men should be known by their fruits and 
judged by their deeds. He enjoined men to make the fruit 
good as well as the tree, and demanded that the whole man 
should be cleansed in act and thought — that there should be 
harmony between the outer and the inner life. For him this 
harmony was what constituted reality in religion and morality. 
Without it there could only be an unreal appearance of both. 
It was reserved for one of his disciples (the writer of the 
Epistle of St. James) to teach, if possible, with even greater 
emphasis, that the inner life, to be perfected, needed to be 
manifested in the outer life ; that the mere sentiment of 
benevolence, or even the will to do good, was unreal, unless 
translated into act when occasion offered. But this emphasis 
was called forth by a new phase of evil, even worse if possible 
than the Pharisaic — by a danger or tendency which attached 
peculiarly to the profession of Pauline Christianity — that is to 
say, the danger of religion running to seed, and exhausting 
itself by indulgence in mere feeling and sentiment, or in 
willing without doing. The evil to which Jesus sought more 
immediately to apply the remedy was the unreal act of good- 
ness — an evil which had for long been growing in Israel, and 
was at last consummated in Pharisaism. Not that in theory 
or in doctrine the importance of the motive, and of the right 
disposition, was denied even by Pharisees, but that practically 



ISO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

these were forgotten or put out of sight. It was, indeed, 
because there was a latent consciousness of the impera- 
tive value of these in the hearts of all men, that when, to 
emancipate men from the authority of Pharisaic doctrine and 
usage, Jesus appealed to their sense of the importance of the 
right disposition, and laid it down as a postulate and first 
principle of religion, he did not speak quite in vain to the men 
of his generation, and that his voice was not as that of one 
crying in the wilderness. And yet the interval was wide 
indeed between the standpoint, not merely of the Pharisee, but 
even of the prophet, who, in moments of spiritual elevation, 
could express the conviction that God desired truth in the 
inward parts, and hated the covetous thought and the adul- 
terous look, and the standpoint of Jesus who declared the 
principial worthlessness of all righteousness which did not pro- 
ceed from the heart, and laid down as a fundamental axiom, 
that no law was fulfilled if obeyed with reluctance, and no 
virtue genuine unless cultivated for its own sake. 

By laying down that no good fruit could -proceed except 
from a good tree, and no good act except from a well-disposed 
heart, Jesus passed sentence of condemnation upon all mechani- 
cal forms of religion, and on all merely outward discipline and 
legality of behaviour. And when we bear in mind that he 
had a firm faith in the inspiration of the Old Testament 
generally, and of the Mosaic legislation in particular, in which 
moral duties and ceremonial usages were enjoined as of equal 
obligation, and the negative was the prevailing form of the 
moral precepts ; when we consider the prescriptive right which 
Scribes and Pharisees had long enjoyed as expounders of the 
Law and the Prophets, it becomes evident to us that it must 
have required a prodigious moral courage — a prodigious force 
and independence of character, besides a profound confidence 
in the autonomy of his own nature, to take up, without loss 
of reverence, with a view of religion so novel, and in many 
respects so different from that of which he professed it to be 
the fulfilment. Indeed, the combination in him of the revo- 
lutionary with the conservative and reverential spirit — a com- 
bination common to him with other great founders of religion 
— only becomes intelligible to us by supposing that, like St. 
Paul afterwards, he may have considered all these legal regu- 
lations, and &e negative form of the Decalogue, to have been 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 8 I 

given by way of concession, or accommodation, to a rude and 
ignorant people, and that to retain them in permanent force 
was only to keep the people from advancing to a more perfect 
and instructed state. By some such consideration as this, 
which is partly hinted at in what he says of the hardness of 
men's hearts, and of the necessity of putting new wine into 
new bottles, he could, on the authority of the inner voice, while 
still believing in the divine sanction of the Law of Moses, 
venture to proclaim that it must give place to a more perfect 
way, and declare that instead of thwarting, he was in reality 
carrying out the divine intention in its every jot and tittle. 

To sum up now what we have said in the present connection, 
we repeat that we do not ascribe to Jesus the discovery of 
any religious truth, absolutely new and original, but only the 
enunciation of truths which were not theoretically denied ; 
which all men rather were semi-conscious of — which existed 
in a latent, germinal state in the minds of all men — which 
many gifted men had given utterance to before him, though 
not with the same perception of their significance for human 
life — truths, in fact, which, by the great majority of men in all 
ages, and under all religions, had been practically forgotten, 
and indeed still are. He was not the very first, it may be, to 
discover that inwardness is an essential attribute of righteous- 
ness ; but he perceived the full importance of this element, and 
insisted upon it with an emphasis and persistency which no 
former teacher ever exhibited. He saw and taught, in a way 
which could scarcely be misunderstood, that no deed could be 
really good unless it was prompted by, unless it was the 
manifestation of, a rightly-disposed mind ; that the motive and 
intention were part of the action itself, and had to be taken 
into account in our judgment of it. And the same fineness of 
insight, the same penetrating quality of the moral sense, which 
gave him such a vivid perception of this principle, led him on 
to the further truth, that the spirit of love, of which he was 
conscious as the actuating force of his own life and conduct, 
was the general disposition or principle which guaranteed the 
Tightness of all particular motives and intentions ; and yet, 
further, that this love had God as well as our fellow-men for its 
object. 

We can thus see how Jesus, starting from his idea of in- 
wardness, might have risen to his ideal of humanity — />., to 



I 82 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

his doctrine of love to God and man as the supreme rule and 
motive of human conduct, and how he might have perceived 
that, apart from this principle, the regard paid to the will of 
God, whether dictated by the fear of His displeasure, or by the 
mercenary desire to conciliate His favour, must necessarily be 
formal and outward — a mere show and semblance without 
reality — a show which men might mistake for reality, 
though even they do not accept for themselves the show of 
love for love itself when they perceive that love is absent, 
but which God who looks upon the heart cannot accept. We 
do not conceive that Jesus reached this conclusion by succes- 
sive steps of the logical understanding, but rather that it was 
implicitly involved in the very first step by which he separated 
himself from Pharisaic influence, and that it rose simultaneously 
therewith in his consciousness. As little do we mean to say, 
that the doctrine was an absolutely novel discovery of his, a 
view of which none before him had ever caught sight. The 
very words which he used to express his ethical principle had 
been employed by prophetic penmen many ages before his day, 
but he gave to their words a wider range. The two factors of 
what he called the " great commandment " occur apart from 
each other indeed in prophetic legislation (Deut. vi. 5, and 
Lev. xix. 1 8) ; but it is evident from the context that the 
" neighbour " whom the Israelite was enjoined to love as him- 
self might be understood, and indeed was understood, as 
restricted to one of the covenanted people. It was a sense of 
this which suggested that question of the lawyer, " Who is my 
neighbour?" (Luke x. 29). The very extension of the duty 
of love to the stranger within the gate (Deut. v. 14) is a proof 
that it did not extend to those that were without. The genius 
of Hebrew legislation, if it did not forbid, was not favour- 
able to such extension, and Jesus was quite justified in his 
interpretation of the law (Matth. v. 43), " It hath been said, 
Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy." The 
shield which protected the stranger did not cover the enemy. 
Love of the latter was more than the legal spirit could venture 
to demand, for that would only have had the effect of betraying 
too sensibly its "weakness through the flesh" (Rom. viii. 3), 
and have put too great a strain upon its authority. Hence the 
bitterness of hatred and invective which, without any apparent 
sense of incongruity on the part of the Psalmist, mars and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 83 

disfigures many of the most beautiful, and otherwise most 
evangelical of the Psalms. It is no apology for these to say 
that the enemy referred to was the enemy of God. The 
principle of hatred is' of a spreading nature, and if indulged in 
towards the enemies of God and of righteousness, will soon 
extend towards one's personal enemies. It was reserved for 
Jesus to say right out, what no legislator, prophet, or psalmist 
in Israel had ever said, " Love thine enemy." The limitation 
of the area in which love was to rule was removed once for 
all, as by a new commandment, by his parable of the Good 
Samaritan. It cannot be affirmed, with the least show of 
truth, that the injunction of love sounded the central or domi- 
nant note even in the ethical scale of prophecy. There was 
much in wide contrast with it in the prophetic thought, 
whereas it is the key to the whole thought of Jesus. Through 
him it receives a clear, emphatic, and compact expression, 
absolutely consistent with all else in his teaching ; and to this 
extent, at least, we must acknowledge the originality of his 
ethical standpoint. The great commandment, as understood 
in Israel, enjoined unlimited love towards God, and in so far 
admitted of no correction ; and our only remark here is, that, as 
conceived by Jesus, the love of God was a supreme regard to His 
will, into which we throw the entire strength of our nature. 
The emotion or sentiment which enters into this determination 
of our will is ethical, inasmuch as it is devotion to God as the 
living Ideal, with the added sense that such devotion is agree- 
able to the nature of man, and therefore his delight. 

Passing now to the conception by Jesus of the divine 
character, we shall find that his originality is still more pro- 
nounced and unquestionable ; though here too, of course, he 
was anticipated in much by the prophets and poets of his 
people. An unquestioning faith in God as a living, conscious, 
and intelligent Agent, had come to Jesus by inheritance, and 
been received by him as the indispensable and indisputable 
presupposition of all religion. He had also inherited the idea 
of God as a God of righteousness, who infallibly meted out 
good and evil to men according to their works. This view of 
the divine character is as powerfully and persistently set forth 
in the Old Testament as it permits of being, though perhaps, 
in the light of the New Testament, we may think that we miss 
there some of the finer shadings of the idea. And yet further, 



I 84 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

he might, and no doubt did learn from the prophets and 
psalmists, to regard God as a gracious and merciful Being. 
There are numberless passages in the psalter and in the pro- 
phets which, taken by themselves, seem to place this aspect of 
His character in the very strongest light. It is often painted 
with indescribable pathos ; but this very pathos is apt to betray 
the want of full conviction : it is too much a matter of reason- 
ing (Isa. i. 18 ; v. 4 ; xliii. 26 ; Micah vi. 3), as if the prophet 
needed to dwell upon the consideration to make sure of it, 
whereas Jesus has no difficulty and no doubt. He assumes 
and takes for granted the propitious and placable character of 
God, and speaks of it with a confidence and childlike simplicity 
of utterance more impressive than the deep pathos of the 
prophets. But that is not all. It is observable in the Old 
Testament that the righteousness of God in dealing with the 
disobedient has a certain air of vindictiveness, and that the 
divine righteousness and divine goodness stand side by side 
as if they were incommensurable quantities, or they are ex- 
pressed in terms which do not admit of being resolved into 
each other, vid. Exod. xx. 5, 6: "God is a jealous God; 
who shows mercy." Readers are left in doubt how His 
attributes can be reconciled. A problem was thus presented 
to believers in Old Testament times which evidently puzzled 
them sorely, and which to the last remained for them in- 
soluble. At most there was a slight indication of a solution 
in such passages as Ps. lxii. 1 2 ; xcix. 8 ; and Ezek. xxxiii. 
11-20 : "O Lord, thou wast a God that forgavest them, 
though thou tookest vengeance of their inventions " ; " As I 
live saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the 
wicked." But the full solution was given by Jesus in his 
invocation of God as the heavenly Father, and in laying that 
view of His nature at the root of his religion. The meaning 
of this designation is that God exercises as a Father His 
mercy towards the penitent by forgiving them, and towards 
the disobedient by punishing them with a view to their 
correction and final salvation. Punishment and forgiveness 
are alike the manifestation of a merciful design ; and His 
righteousness is ministrant to His goodness and beneficence, 
or rather they are fundamentally one. This is the evangelical 
view of the divine righteousness as opposed to the legal view, 
above which even the prophets could never rise. The right- 



^ • - 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 85 

eousness of God is inflexible, but salvation is its goal ; and 
eternity of punishment has no place in the Christian scheme, 
whatever texts may be cited to the contrary. And as to the 
novelty of this view of divine righteousness there can be no 
question. There is, indeed, more than one passage in the 
Old Testament in which the prophetic spirit almost seems to 
touch it, as where the first of the canonical prophets, Amos, 
in the passage already quoted, represents God as saying, 
" You only have I known of all the families of the earth, 
therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." But the 
mere idea of an election was enough to prevent the thought 
from coming to full expression, and receiving full justice, as 
we may see, e.g., in that remarkable instance in Jeremiah 
xxx. 1 1 , where God says, " Though I make a full end of all 
nations, whither I have scattered thee, yet will I not make a 
full end of thee." The righteousness of God is here recon- 
ciled to His mercy towards Israel by an act of favouritism 
and caprice. His righteousness attains its proper end in the 
full and final destruction of the heathen ; but it is relaxed in 
favour of the "remnant of Israel" (Ezek. xi. 13). In the 
fatherly character of God, on the other hand, as depicted in 
the gospel, there is no antagonism between His goodness 
and His severity, between His mercy and His judgment ; 
and in this respect we mark a clear advance of the evan- 
gelical doctrine beyond the standpoint of the law and the 
prophets. 

It may be said, indeed, that a wavering is visible in the 
doctrine of Jesus respecting the divine character somewhat 
similar to that in the Old Testament. It has been said that 
the Gospels attribute " two contrary spirits to Christ," that 
even " his language is often the language of denunciation as 
well as of blessing " ; and that he represents God as extreme 
to mark iniquity. Now to this the reply is, that the life of 
man has its deeply serious side ; that, while heavy afflictions 
may overtake the righteous, the wicked do not go unpunished, 
and that in God's dealing with mankind His severity is hardly 
less conspicuous than His goodness. So far as the teaching 
of Jesus does but reflect these two aspects of His dealings 
there is nothing in it to object to. But in so far as it goes 
beyond this : so far, e.g., as Jesus seems to teach everlasting 
punishment to the wicked, we take this to be a proof, not 



I 86 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that two contrary spirits breathe in his teaching, but that his 
words have been misreported. His disciples were very apt, 
under their terrible persecutions, to overlook the nuances of 
his language and to exaggerate his denunciations of his 
opponents ; to give an edge, borrowed from prophetic or 
rabbinical teaching, to his words. But the man who had 
such a vivid intuition of the divine character : who could re- 
present Him as " kind to the unthankful and to the evil," 
could not but reject from his teaching all that conflicted 
with that conception. We are far from seeking to deify Jesus, 
or even to represent him as an absolutely perfect revelation 
of God, whether by his teaching or his conduct. But per- 
suaded as we are that he was " not less eminent for his 
intellectual than for his moral greatness," we believe that he 
thoroughly apprehended his own great doctrine of the divine 
fatherhood, and that he would give no countenance to any 
ideas which were manifestly inconsistent with it. 

If, now, it be asked, how Jesus was able to reach this new 
conception of God, and to take this step in advance of 
prophecy, and of the current theology, it may help us to an 
answer if we consider that in proportion as our moral ideas 
are purified and exalted, so also is our conception of God and 
of the relation in which He stands to us. Naturally, or 
rather necessarily, we ascribe to God the possession of the 
highest imaginable qualities of which we have any conception. 
Let the speculative thinker cavil as he may, the idea that 
the finite creature cannot possibly be furnished with capacities, 
whether moral or intellectual, " by a Being, who himself has 
none," will always command the assent of the majority of 
mankind. We can hardly but conceive of our Ideal as 
realized in Him to constitute His perfection. It is impossible 
that, on any other view, we could ever present Him to our- 
selves as an object of supreme regard. Now it is manifest 
that that love which Jesus recognized as the principle of all 
right conduct, and of the presence of which in himself he was 
conscious as the actuating principle of his own life and con- 
duct, embraced the loveless and the unthankful in its regards ; 
and according to what has just been said, he could not but 
feel that love in God would have a like function or aspect 
even towards the evil ; that His dealings with them, even in 
retribution, would be a manifestation of His love and good- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 87 

ness ; and that His relation to them would still be that of a 
father seeking by severity to correct and conciliate them. 
Such is certainly the spirit of his teaching, and there is a 
probability that he gave it a more full, repeated, and un- 
qualified expression than is reported in the synoptists (Luke 

vi. 3 5, 36). 

It does not enter into our plan to portray that inimitable 
character of Jesus, in which tenderness of feeling and depth 
of sympathy were so intimately blended with a certain gravity 
of demeanour and sternness of judgment, so as to account 
for the deep impression made upon his disciples by his 
personality. And as little do we propose to attempt a 
detailed analysis of his teaching, such as may be found in 
the works of Pfleiderer, Weiss, Keim, and other German 
theologians. The remark, indeed, is an obvious one, that 
Jesus did not seek to teach a complete or connected system 
of morality or religion ; but was content to enunciate a few 
leading principles, to suggest certain motives of action, and 
to breathe a new life into his disciples. And it is our object 
only to trace, so far as we can, the line of thought and 
action by which he gained that deep insight into the nature 
of true religion, which not only placed him in antagonism to 
the Pharisaism of his day, but even carried him beyond the 
prophetic standpoint ; and we may say here, what we have 
elsewhere implied, that we believe him to have gained that 
insight, not by means of logical deduction, or metaphysical 
reasoning, or philosophical speculation, but by a method 
which we may call empirical or practical. We imagine him 
to have been endowed in a unique degree with the power 
conferred by the clear intellect, the single eye, and the pure 
heart, of interpreting the moral and religious instincts, and of 
reading those secrets of the spiritual life which are common 
to the finite and the infinite (1 Cor. ii. 9-12). 

There is thus a dialectic by which the mind of man may 
be supposed to rise from the inwardness of genuine morality 
to the idea of God as the Heavenly Father, who is kind even 
to the evil and unthankful, and seeks their good, even in the 
suffering which He sends upon them. Not that we can indicate 
with certainty, or clearly represent to ourselves, how, or by 
what avenue, a religious genius, situated as Jesus was, could 
reach this conception. " Hie spirit bloweth where it listeth 



I 88 THE NATURAL HISTORY ( )Y 

. . . but thou canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither 
it goeth." We are only concerned to show that there is an 
avenue by which such a conclusion might be reached by the 
human mind ; and we may trust that whatever is abstractly 
accessible to all men may be reached by one or more of our 
species. We do not imagine that the conception of God 
would grow up in the mind of Jesus distinct from his ideal 
of humanity, but that both together would rise and take 
shape pari passu. His deeply devout and reverential mind 
would regard as essential to the character of God that spirit 
of good which could only be the result of an effort of self- 
sacrifice and self-development in the mind of man. His im- 
agination would clothel the divine Being with the attribute of 
love in its reality, which only belonged potentially or ideally 
to the human subject. The speculative or scientific thinker 
may derive from other sources his view of the unseen power, 
which pervades and upholds all existence ; but the religious 
mind rises to its last and highest knowledge of God from its 
knowledge of self; and the finite spirit, whether in Jesus, or 
in any other individual, could have risen to the thought that 
love to God was man's bounden duty, only by conceiving, at 
the same time, of love as the great moral attribute and 
moving spring of divine action. To say that love is due from 
man to God involves the confession that God is lovable ; 
and that He can be only because He is love. 

But dialectic is not the only avenue by which Jesus might 
reach this conclusion. He might also reach it by personal 
experience. By such dialectic as the above it was possible only 
to reach a somewhat vague and general idea of the divine 
fatherliness. But by personal experience he might gain a 
more distinct and definite view of it and of its culmination in 
the forgiveness of sin, as we shall now proceed to show. We 
have often seen it asserted that provided a law or principle 
has been practically ascertained and established, it is of little 
or of no consequence how or by whom it has been dis- 
covered. But whatever truth there may be in this maxim, it 
does not apply here in a discussion which is intended to show 
that the conviction of the absolute placability of God, which 

the distinctively evangelical doctrine, might be derived, 
not from any supernatural communication, but through purely 
human experience. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 89 

That men from the beginning and under every form of 
religion have entertained a hope of the divine forgiveness of 
their sins is a well attested fact. Such a hope is so natural 
that it hardly needs to be accounted for. Wherever the moral 
sense is awakened and the accusing voice is heard, men feel 
that some hope of forgiveness is necessary to save them from 
despair, or from casting off all regard to the will of God, and 
to give them any prospect of a gradual approximation to the 
ideal life. In Israel the hope of forgiveness was a strong and 
living principle, but it never rose beyond a hope, of which 
perhaps the most classical expression is that of the Psalmist 
(exxx. 4), " There is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be 
feared." In that hope there was ever an element of uncertainty, 
because the feeling was never got rid of that some propitiatory 
service, ritualistic, ascetic, or disciplinary was needed, that God 
might forgive. Without any undue pressure of the letter of the 
Psalmist's words, it may be said that the effect of this was that 
God could only be "feared" or reverenced, but not loved. The 
need of propitiatory service not only introduces an element of 
uncertainty, but, however minimized, it tends to belittle the 
divine placability, and to repress the outflow of the replying 
love which is the instrument of joyful progress towards the 
ideal. The exquisite narrative in Luke regarding the woman 
who was a sinner seems to show, not that forgiveness is the 
recognition or reward of love, but that the much love is the 
token and effect of the free forgiveness. To be instrumental 
in this way, divine love needs to be conceived of as absolutely 
free ; free from all dependence on propitiatory service, and as 
such it is presented in the teaching of Jesus ; free, be it said, as 
the common air which men breathe, and firm as the earth upon 
which men walk in safety without fearing that a false step may 
cause it to slip from under their feet. 

The question now before us is, by what experience Jesus 
rose from that uncertain hope of forgiveness to that certainty 
and confidence which breathe through all his teaching. The 
great difficulty of this step of thought will be felt if we bear 
in mind that the physical and social effects of sin remain in 
all cases as its penalty, and seem to show that it is never 
fully forgiven. And our reply to the question now put is, 
that Jesus rose to his conviction, not merely by development 
of that natural hope, but mainly by starting afresh from the 



igO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

spiritual basis on which the true relation of God to man de- 
pends. 

(i.) We may figure to ourselves Jesus as a man of the 
ordinary or average type, and suppose him to have perceived, 
as all of us in some measure do perceive, that his moral nature, 
the fact of his being able to form an ideal carried in it the 
obligation ; and if the obligation, then the possibility of his 
realizing or gradually approximating to his ideal. And yet 
when, feeling the attraction and owning the authority of that 
ideal, he proceeded with the attempt to realize it, he would be 
taught by experience in the first instance that the task was so 
arduous as to be almost impossible. To his sensitive conscience 
the arrears of guilt would gather on his soul and place insuper- 
able obstacles in the way of his advance till they would bring 
him to the brink of despair. He would feel that he could reach 
towards the ideal only through a succession of failures and 
stumblings, shortcomings, and defections, and that his endeavour 
to propitiate God would bring him no nearer the goal. He 
would perceive that to make advance possible there was an 
absolute necessity that there should be forgiveness with God, 
or, as we should say, some divine law or order of which forgive- 
ness was the popular expression, the sensuous representation, 
and of which all religions without exception have given to their 
votaries the hope at least. 

And we can further conceive that a deeply serious and as- 
piring spirit like Jesus would as a last resource put this hope, 
this idea, to the proof; that he would tentatively, or, let us say, 
hypothetically or provisionally place confidence in divine for- 
giveness as his encouragement to devote himself to the work of 
righteousness, to the realization of the ideal, or to the reduction 
to a minimum of that evil from which no human being is ab- 
solutely free. He would, by a great resolve, give up all attempt 
to propitiate God, and surrender himself to the thought that 
nothing of the kind was necessary. And thus endeavouring, he 
would find that his confidence in the absolute placability of 
God would help him to advance to the goal. To proceed in 
this manner would no doubt be to act upon a hypothesis, but 
like many another hypothesis in physical and social science, it 
might be verified by the results in his own moral nature, and 
become for him a conviction and a certitude as we know it was 
for Jesus. We hold that there is no improbability in this con- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 9 I 

jecture. There is a range within which "what is called truth is 
only the hypothesis, which is found to work best." And if it 
be found that a belief in the absolute clemency of God is what 
above all else strengthens the soul in its conflict with evil, no 
stronger proof of this view of the divine character can be desired 
or imagined. 

Or, (2.) We may conceive of Jesus as a man far above the 
average type, as a man of quite an exceptional or even unique 
strength and grandeur of character, who would never give way 
to despair or succumb to the difficulty of reaching the goal, but 
would keep the goal in view, and strive towards it with his 
whole soul in spite of all discouragements which might arise 
from involuntary lapses and constitutional defects. In the 
words of the Stoic Cleanthes (quoted by Dr. Hatch, Hibbert 
Lectures, 1888) such an one might say, — "Even though I 
degenerate be, and consent reluctantly, None the less I follow 
thee." Persevering thus, it might at last dawn upon him that 
the consciousness of this wholeness of intention, this singleness 
of aim, delivered him from self-condemnation. And very justly 
so, inasmuch as the finite creature being imperfect must neces- 
sarily fall short of its own ideal, and cannot by any possibility 
perfectly fulfil the abstract requirements of the law of its nature. 
The most, therefore, that absolute justice can demand is that 
the individual should honestly and sincerely strive to fulfil that 
law. For as Goethe says, " Vollkommenheit ist die Norm des 
Himmels, Vollkommenes wollen die Norm des Menschen." 

The integrity of the finite creature consists not in absolute 
sinlessness, but in the sincerity of his effort to conform to the 
law ; and the consciousness of such integrity is what gives him 
confidence in the presence of the higher powers, and procures 
for him the highest good, the approbation of his own conscience, 
the sense of harmony with the universal order, or peace with 
God. 

This conduct with its accompanying reward is specified by 
Jesus (Matth. vi. 33) as the duty incumbent upon all men 
without exception. And in our view there may have been not 
a few individuals of our race besides Jesus, though none so 
much as he, who have set themselves resolvedly, in spite of the 
evil which clung to them and haunted their steps and marred 
their lives, to make righteousness the aim and object of their 
most strenuous effort, and who, while so engaged, have emerged 



192 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

as by a spiritual law from the sphere or element of strict, vex- 
atious, and self-defeating legality into a sphere in which it 
seemed as if justice was tempered by mercy, but which was 
really a sphere in which the highest justice prevailed. In so 
saying we cannot omit to observe parenthetically that this 
aspect of divine mercy, in which it is seen to turn to justice, 
is presented in I John i. 9, "If we confess our sins, God is 
faithful and just to forgive us our sins." For it is only by 
identifying justice and mercy in the last resort that we can 
attach the full meaning to this passage, and we have to take 
into account the fundamental identity of these two in order to 
reconcile the great doctrine that men are saved by grace, with 
that other equally great and prominent doctrine, that they will 
be judged according to their works. But to return : Men who 
have experienced that translation, of which we are speaking, 
from the one sphere to the other, would, if in any sense theists, 
as a matter of course see in their escape from self-condem- 
nation a token of their deliverance from divine condemnation. 
For this is just what is asserted in the profound words of one 
who drank deeply into the spirit of Jesus, and might meta- 
phorically be said to have leaned upon his bosom. " If our 
heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God " 
(1 John iii. 21). In the verdict of their own highest nature 
such persons would recognize the verdict of God, who " is 
greater than our heart and knoweth all things." If a man's 
judgment of himself be the judgment pronounced by his own 
highest nature, it is a very great thing, and not a " small thing," 
and must coincide with the judgment of God. St. Paul's 
words (1 Cor. iv. 3, 4) are not opposed to this view when they 
are carefully weighed. And it is thus conceivable that Jesus 
might have risen to his confidence in the forgiveness of sins 
whatever of their penalties might remain. 

Whether this or that other be the process by which Jesus 
rose to this confidence we leave our readers to judge. We our- 
selves give the preference to the latter supposition. But one 
way or the other he gained his great conviction by deep insight 
and experience without any supernatural communication, and 
communicated it as his message to men to encourage them in 
their struggle towards the better life. The sense of blessedness 
achieved by self-surrender to the highest law of his nature, Jesus 
as a theist could not but regard in the light of an obligation to 



I 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 193 

God, who had so tempered his nature as to make it capable 
of such an experience, or as a proof and token of the infinite 
placability of the Author of his being. From the level of morality 
he thus rose by means of his theism into the atmosphere of 
religion, and he taught his disciples to maintain with success their 
conflict with evil, not so much by engaging in the struggle 
with their own lower nature as by rising above themselves into 
fellowship with the All-Good. That conviction of the absolute 
placability of God and of peace with Him, which in him, and 
possibly in other strong ones of our race, might be the effect 
of righteousness (Isa. xxxii. 17), may in the case of the weak 
ones, when received on his authority, be their motive and en- 
couragement to engage in the work of righteousness. Luther's 
hope would never have carried him to a successful termination 
of the mental conflict in which his sense of guilt involved him. 
Had it not been for the " nameless monk," who is said to 
have reminded him of the forgiveness of sin, he would have 
sunk under that struggle. The assurance which Jesus gained 
as the result of deep insight and supreme devotion, Luther had 
to accept, on his authority, to sustain him from the first in the 
conflict. It is not given to every man to discover this great 
secret of the spiritual life. Only such a man as Jesus was, and 
others of like moral fibre and like spiritual insight, have proved 
and come upon it, aud announced it with more or less im- 
pressiveness and authority to their fellows. The most that 
men in general can do is to verify it in their own experience 
after it has been revealed to them in gospel or in prophecy. 
The full and final revelation of this secret by Jesus has put 
each of us in the way of verifying it for himself, and constitutes 
our common dependence upon him as our guide to the better 
life. 

His great achievement was, that he placed himself in touch 
and intercourse with the divine, and was enabled to reveal the 
secret of that intercourse for the benefit and instruction of man. 
This is what gives him to this day a unique claim to the bound- 
less veneration of his followers, and forms his title to be re- 
garded as the " author and finisher of our faith," the Founder 
of Christianity. In this sense it was that St. Paul was pro- 
foundly sensible of the dependence upon Jesus of his own 
spiritual life, and after him such men as Augustine and Luther, 
and all who have entered into the mind of Jesus and have 

N 



194 TIIE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

sounded the depths of the evangelical principle. From the 
view here given it may be seen that the evangelical idea of 
righteousness is relatively a development from the legal idea ; 
and it becomes intelligible how, in the teaching of Jesus, no 
absolute distinction is made or contrast drawn between faith 
and works, between law and grace, as in the teaching of St. 
Paul; a proof of how much more profoundly and simply than 
the latter the former had apprehended and solved the great 
spiritual problem. We can also see that Christianity owed its 
origin to a greater than Paul. 

The craving for forgiveness, which is father to the hope, 
and is as common as the sense of guilt, predisposes men to 
accept of the proclamation of a free forgiveness — the glad 
tidings of the gospel. But the freedom and unconditional 
nature of it is safe-guarded by this, that while that hope or 
craving commits men to nothing, and may be cherished while 
sin is indulged in without control, this faith can only be 
received into a pure conscience, into a heart which honestly 
endeavours to turn from sin without any secret hankering after 
it. By proclaiming divine forgiveness on such terms, by causing 
that trembling, impotent hope of divine forgiveness, which has 
been entirely absent from no religion, to pass in the hearts of 
his followers into a life-sustaining energy, Jesus may be said 
to have raised the thoughts of men, and to have brought a new 
power into the world for the lifting of human life. The revela- 
tion of his soteriological method, the gaining for it a place in 
human faith and practice, we take to have been his peculiar 
work as a teacher ; his contribution to the moral welfare and 
spiritual interests of men. And the success which has attended 
his work is to be measured by the degree of earnestness and 
hopefulness which his followers have exhibited in their conflict 
with evil. 

In expressing this opinion as to the nature of our spiritual 
dependence upon him, we are far from intending to imply that 
Christianity is a simply soteriological system. It rests upon 
presuppositions common to Judaism and all other ethical 
religions, and embraces these within itself. But what is 
meant is, that whatever was new in the teaching of Jesus 
was directly soteriological and bore upon human deliverance 
from evil. Whatever changes he introduced into current 
religious thought proceeded from his soteriological doctrine. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 95 

Whatever in Judaism was inconsistent with that doctrine he 
may be considered to have set aside, but to have left all else 
standing. Time was required for his doctrine to show its 
range of effect in various directions. But simple as that 
doctrine may seem to be, its effect, direct and indirect, im- 
mediate and remote, has, we believe, extended to every 
department of thought and action. 

The uncertain and fluctuating hope of divine forgiveness is, 
as already remarked, absent from no religion. But the service 
which a man is enabled to render by such a hope is apt to 
be servile and propitiatory. The effort to which it stimulates 
is directed to earn the certainty of forgiveness by the more 
diligent and unreserved discharge of duty ; an effort which, 
being necessarily unsatisfactory to the tender conscience, is 
apt to slip into Pharisaic and outward observance, and to 
prompt that question — "What more shall I do?" and thus to 
turn again the whole moral life into a propitiatory and legal 
service. On the other hand, Jesus inculcated the certainty 
of forgiveness, and encouraged every man who honestly desired 
deliverance from evil to believe in it with the most unhesitating 
confidence. This confidence he laid at the very foundation 
of his religion, thus showing that he recognized its full signi- 
ficance. He taught men to regard divine love, or that for- 
giveness in which it finds its culminating manifestation, as 
something which goes before and is the source and spring 
of all true service ; of a service, that is, which is rendered 
not in a mercenary spirit, to earn or make sure of divine 
favour ; but in the spirit of thankfulness for that unearned 
goodness of God which is always operating, but of which 
we can become fully conscious only by drawing upon it as 
a source of strength in running the Christian race. Between 
that merely legal service which we may render from the 
hope of forgiveness of our failures, and the evangelical service 
to which we are prompted by that conviction of the pre- 
venting love of God, the difference is immense : and it is to 
Jesus that men are indebted for setting that difference forth, 
and enabling them to effect the passage from the one to 
the other. As disciples of Jesus we at first adopt his view of 
the religious relation upon his simple authority, as that of a 
Master who stood far above us in spiritual might. And in so 
far, his teaching may be said to be dogmatic, but it ceases to 



1 96 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

be dogmatic when it is afterwards verified in our experience. 
(Compare John iv. 39-42.) 

It will help to an understanding of the renovating power of 

the gospel if we here advert to the fact that human life is 

subject to a law of moral continuity, by which is meant a 

tendency in the life of sin to wax more and more sinful, and 

to continue in the downward course on which it has once 

entered, and even to acquire momentum in that course. At 

the same time this tendency may be retarded, or arrested, 

or even reverted and turned back, and an upward direction 

impressed upon the life, without a breach or suspension of 

that indefeasible law. The possibility of this is explained by 

the presence and function of that ideal principle in the 

human mind of which we have spoken, the intrinsically human 

faculty of conceiving and of being attracted by a better life 

than that which is; by a life the reverse it may be of that 

which we have hitherto led or grown to. This faculty may 

long lie dormant, or torpid and inactive, but it has the life 

in itself, as is the case with every other germ, and may 

awaken as by a stirring from within by its own vital energy, 

or by some call, or from an appeal addressed to it from 

without, such as that which awakens the sleeper (Eph. v. 

8). Except through this ideal principle no reaction or 

revulsion from the life of sin can take place in human 

experience. It is an upward force, the germ of a higher 

nature in man, and may be the inception of an impulse to a 

triumphant struggle against that gravitation to evil which is 

the penalty which we incur, or rather which we aggravate, 

by indulging in habits of sin. But this germ needs to be 

developed ; it would be suppressed, or brought to the point 

of extinction, or reduced to a state of hopeless torpidity, by 

mere disuse, or by countervailing tendencies, unless it were 

stimulated and roused into activity either by social influences 

or by the consciousness of the sympathy of the unseen 

Power to which we are accountable. These better influences 

are probably never wholly extinct in any form of society 

however depraved. But at the time of Jesus the social 

influences, though not wholly adverse, were at least not 

calculated to stimulate the endeavour towards a high ideal. 

The better influences necessary for such a purpose had yet 

to be created, and for the time their place was supplied to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 197 

the disciples by their intercourse with Jesus himself and by 
his doctrine that God, as the Father in heaven, was on 
the side of every better effort. By teaching that God is 
patient of human failure, that He freely forgives men their 
lapses, and cancels their arrears of guilt, he inspired them 
with the courage to engage and to prevail in the great struggle 
of their lives. Not that he brought down any divine energy 
to take daemonic possession of their wills and to supplement 
their own powers ; for that would have been to encroach on 
their individual life : but simply that he communicated to 
them an idea of divine sympathy and goodwill which exalted 
them above themselves in conformity with the laws of their 
nature and without trenching on the sacredness of their 
rational life. That was the idea which Jesus had drawn out 
of his own deep experience and sought to imprint on the 
consciousness of his disciples ; — the idea by which he awakened 
in humanity what has been fitly called the Christian conscious- 
ness. This consciousness, which Jesus has brought as a new 
power into human life, consists in a new ideal of humanity 
and a new conception of God, which are really one and 
indivisible. And even if the absolute and speculative truth 
of either the one or the other be questioned, it can hardly 
be denied that in practice they have proved to millions of 
our race to be the source of comfort in trouble, of strength 
against temptation, and of direction in the conduct of life. 
Together they constituted the idea by which Jesus sought to 
raise his countrymen to a higher level of the religious life, 
not as if he expected that the mere acceptance of it in 
theory would serve as by magic to that end, but that the 
end would be gained if they moulded life upon it and if 
they engaged in the hard struggle, to which it called them, 
with their baser and lower tendencies. By his teaching and 
example Jesus corrected and simplified our notion of the 
religious life ; but, great as is the boon which has thus 
been conferred upon us, there is still the difficulty of acting 
upon that notion. 

That new ideal of humanity and that new conception of 
God were alike requisite for the foundation of the new 
religion. For it is evident that had Jesus only acted the 
part of a legislator, and lifted the standard of human life, 
he would thereby have deepened in us the consciousness 



I98 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of sin, and filled us with heightened despair. The high 
ideal, it may be confessed, has an attraction over our hearts. 
We would fain do the good, if we could, and choose the 
better part of which we approve ; but the distress and miser}' 
of man is that the power of performance is not ours. Our 
higher nature, though it has the might of conscious right 
upon its side, is yet weak by comparison, and unable to 
assert itself against the established habit and entrenched 
position of our lower nature. Notwithstanding our better 
knowledge and our higher aspiration our hearts still gravitate 
towards that selfishness which is and must be the first and 
uppermost instinct of the finite creature. That love, which 
is the fulfilling of the law, will not come at the word of 
command. At the very commencement of our struggle to 
be better, to act from higher principles, we are sensible that 
our motives are mixed ; that the evil is present with us, and 
that we have sinned already ; that self is the spring of our 
actions, even in the effort to rise above self ; that " from a 
selfish motive we cannot become unselfish," and that the 
gravitation of the will towards evil is equivalent to the deed 
of evil ; that it is only from some inferior motive that we 
have it in our power to form or to reform our lives ; that 
the battle has already gone against us at the beginning, and 
that it is of no use to continue the fight after we have 
been vanquished. To meet this daunting obstacle, this sore 
discouragement in our advance towards perfection, Jesus im- 
parted his new conception of the divine character. He 
taught men to believe in God's fatherly disposition, in His 
love and goodwill, in His perpetual forgiveness of the sins 
that are past, and in the favourable regard which He extends, 
after all our falls and shortcomings, to our efforts to rise 
again, to renew our pursuit of the ideal which beckons to us, 
and lays the force of an obligation upon us, and in our ap- 
proach to which lies the true felicity of our nature. 

We can thus see that the power of upward attraction, 
which naturally and universally resides in the ideal, however 
insufiicient of itself, may be reinforced by that love to God 
which the doctrine of divine forgiveness as taught by Jesus 
is calculated to awaken. For of love it has been said, that 
it " gives to every power a double power above their func- 
tions and their offices " (Shakespeare), and in this sense it is, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. I 99 

and in no other, that Christianity is a graft upon the stock 
of nature. 

We have dwelt the longer on the doctrine of divine for- 
giveness, because the view of it now taken is essential to 
the anti-supernatural construction of Christianity, and before 
leaving this part of the subject we shall here yet further 
illustrate what has been said : — 

(i) The calm assuredness with which Jesus announced this 
doctrine arose from his knowledge that it would find an echo 
in the human heart. For the man who repents and turns 
from his sins the remembrance of them loses its accusing 
power, and their guilt seems to fall away as belonging to a 
past that is dead and gone. To say, therefore, that God 
forgives the penitent is as much as to say that the man's 
self-forgiveness has the sanction of God. The counsel given 
to the penitent, by a deep seer into the secrets of human 
life, is " Do as the heavens have done ; forget your evil ; 
with them forgive yourself." 

(2) Viewed as the gift of God pardon can in no sense 
be regarded as a partial or arbitrary act of divine sovereignty. 
It is not, as ultra-evangelicals seem to think, a whitewash 
applied externally to the pollution of the soul. It can only 
be dispensed according to fixed principles and the uniform 
operation of a divine law. Divine placability is in truth 
only an aspect of divine justice. For God to withhold for- 
giveness from the penitent would argue an unjust and 
vindictive temper. The same deep seer into human life 
(Shakespeare) has said, " Who by repentance is not satisfied 
is not of heaven nor earth. For they are pleased." True 
it is that our best repentance needs to be repented of. 
But that is only to say that at the best our repentance is 
imperfect, and that our sense of this should supply a motive 
for renewed effort. And we cannot conceive of a just God 
as rejecting the repentance of a necessarily imperfect being 
like man simply because of its imperfection. He accepts as 
sincere a repentance which acts as a stimulus to forsake our 
sins. 

And (3) this leads to the remark that man's faith in 
divine forgiveness is the means of which the new life is the 
end. The penalty of past sin is that it makes sincere 
repentance hard and difficult. But when under the pressure 



200 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of sin repentance begins to stir, as it does more or less in 
all men, a conviction of divine forgiveness on the part of the 
sinner flying from temptation acts as a rearguard to prevent 
the reviving sin from again overtaking and regaining its 
mastery over him. In short, to take it upon trust that forgive- 
ness waits upon repentance is our encouragement to repent, 
and infuses the element of hope into our struggle, otherwise 
hopeless, with our baser nature. 

From a world-historical point of view, or from that of the 
science of comparative theology, the rapid rise, and the almost 
as rapid decadence of Buddhism furnish a demonstration that 
principles of morality, however pure and exalted, and the 
practice of self-discipline, however rigid, do not of themselves 
contain all the elements which are necessary to the permanent 
elevation of humanity, or to its power of self-retrieval after 
periods of moral degeneracy. This power, so far as we know, 
the doctrine of Buddha has never exhibited. To these ele- 
ments a theology and an eschatology require to be added. 
The latter was adopted by Jesus into his doctrine from the 
thought of his time and country ; and the theology which 
he added to the thoughts of men he presented in its purest 
and simplest form by teaching (drawn from the well of his 
own deep experience) that God was the Heavenly Father, who 
overlooks the lapses and failures of His children, and sym- 
pathizes with their every effort to extricate themselves from 
the slime of evil. 

In these remarks we have anticipated and answered the ob- 
jection to the ethical ideal of Christianity which Mr. Herbert 
Spencer has formulated, and of which many before him have 
felt the force. According to him, that ideal is only too 
high for common human nature ; its requirements of self- 
abnegation, of the love of enemies, etc., are impracticable, 
apt to drive men to despair and to the renunciation or 
slackening of all moral effort, and so to prove injurious to 
practical morality, seeing that " by association with rules that 
cannot be obeyed, rules that can be obeyed lose their auth- 
ority." And such, indeed, might be the effect upon indi- 
viduals who looked only to the ethical ideal, and did not 
also include within the field of their thought the Christian 
conception of the paternal character of God. But he that 
extends his view to this is elevated above himself bv the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 201 

feeling that God is on his side, and is encouraged to address 
himself to the achievement of what he would otherwise regard 
as unachievable. After every fall such an one rises again, 
and perseveres in pursuit however far he may come short, 
and however slow his advance. The apostle who entered 
most deeply into the thought of Jesus, and was most conscious 
of his own insufficiency, tells us respecting himself, that he 
forgot the things that were behind, whether they were his 
past failures or his past successes, that he might press on to 
the things before, to heights not yet attained by him : and 
his was no abnormal or solitary experience. 

The doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood is peculiarly distinc- 
tive of the teaching of Jesus ; as distinctive of it as that of 
the better righteousness and of the ideal nature of the king- 
dom of God ; and all three are no doubt organically connected. 
Not that the doctrine had absolutely never occurred to human 
minds before Jesus gave expression to it. That it had dawned 
faintly in almost every ethnic religion is well known, and in 
a few passages of the Hebrew Scriptures God is spoken of 
as a Father. But the novelty of the doctrine of Jesus con- 
sisted in the emphasis and prominence given to the idea. 
In the prayer which he gave to his disciples as a model he 
taught them to address God as " Our Father in Heaven " ; 
and this formula was adopted by all his disciples as their 
distinctive mode of addressing the Deity (i Pet. ii. 17). 
Then, too, the Fatherhood of God, as conceived by Jesus, was 
distinguished from the conception of it in the Old Testament 
by the note of universalism. Singularly, though intelligibly 
enough, some orthodox theologians, in the apologetic interest, 
have sought as much as possible to minimize the originality 
of this doctrine of Jesus. One able apologist, Dr. Bruce, has 
lately pointed to the beautiful words of Isaiah, " Doubtless, 
thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and 
Israel acknowledge us not," as indicative of the " general drift 
of the Hebrew Scriptures," in which, moreover, he finds only 
" a few traces of a legal spirit." 

But surely it requires some vastly apologetic bias or 
partiality of judgment thus to efface the distinction between 
the legal spirit which predominates in the Old Testament, 
and the evangelical spirit which predominates in the New. 
It is undeniable, no doubt, that there are anticipations, many 



202 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of them of the evangelical spirit, in the Old Testament, just 
as there are traces of a survival of the legal spirit in the 
New Testament. But the whole context of the passage in 
Isaiah, which Dr. Bruce quotes, has only to be read in order 
to see that the prophet is addressing God as the God of 
Israel as distinct from the surrounding nations, of whom it 
is said, that " Thou never barest rule over them ; they were 
not called by thy name" (Isa. lxiii. 19). Even Jeremiah 
knows of God as the " Father of Israel " only. In a word, 
God is called Father in the Old Testament only because He 
had chosen Israel as His peculiar people, and had given His 
law to it alone. And even this law once given, this mark 
of His favour once bestowed, all God's subsequent dealings 
with the people of Israel are supposed to be conducted, as 
already pointed out, in a strictly legal spirit. Or, if other- 
wise — if God from time to time refrains from dealing with 
them in such a spirit — it is only out of regard to the mercy 
which He had sworn to the fathers from the days of old 
(Micah vii. 18-20; Ps. lxxxix. 28, 31-34). And this idea of 
a Divine Fatherhood restricted to Israel obviously excludes 
the idea of the Universal Fatherhood which is the doctrine of 
Jesus. The interval between the standpoint of Jesus and that 
of the prophets is, indeed, immense. Passages there may be 
in the writings of the latter in which the interval seems almost 
as if it were on the point of vanishing, or of being bridged 
across; but the decisive step by which the communication 
might have been established is never taken, the interval is 
never got over. This observation is borne out by the col- 
lateral and very noticeable fact, that the new covenant which 
Jeremiah foretells is represented as a covenant " with the house 
of Israel and the house of Judah " only (Jer. xxxi. 31). 

As we have here touched upon a singular misapprehension 
by a distinguished apologist of the relation at one very import- 
ant point between the doctrine of the Old and the New Testa- 
ments, we shall take the liberty of making a short digression in 
order to point out a corresponding misapprehension, equally 
singular, by another apologist (if he can be regarded as such) 
of the relation between Christian thought and Greek specula- 
tion. In his Hibbert Lecture, 1888, p. 224, Dr. Hatch says, 
that "in many passages of the New Testament, and not least of 
all in the discourses of Jesus, moral conduct is spoken of as 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 203 

work done for wages," and he refers to such passages as illustra- 
tive of the " Christian Idea," by way too of contrasting this idea 
with the more purely ethical thought of Greece. He does not 
take into account that when such passages occur in the dis- 
courses of Jesus especially, as Matth. v. 12, Luke vi. 23, Mark 
ix. 41, they lose their legal and mercenary colouring if they are 
interpreted, as they ought to be, in the light of his fundamental 
thought ; nor does he advert to the many indications that the 
reward in heaven is not future but timeless. In this same con- 
nection Dr. Hatch makes the very questionable statement that 
in the New Testament punishment is vindictive, and not 
remedial; and both this statement and that other that punish- 
ment is external to the offender, and follows on the offence by 
sentence of the Judge, and not by a self-acting law, are in- 
stances of a superficial criticism which makes no allowance for 
the use of popular phraseology, or a criticism which needs to be 
qualified by the general principle laid down by St. Paul, Gal. vi. 
7, " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." That 
there are traces of the legal spirit not easily to be explained away 
in some of the canonical books of the New Testament, and 
especially in the book of Revelation, is not to be denied. In 
regard to which last book such traces may fairly be regarded as 
evidences of an insecure hold on the part of the apokalyptist, 
of the evangelical spirit, or perhaps, as lending some support to 
the latest theory regarding the book, according to which it is 
an interpolated edition of a Jewish apokalypse. 

A somewhat hasty perusal of Dr. Hatch's book has left upon 
our mind the impression that he is carried away by the brief he 
took in hand, viz., to show the extent of Greek influence on the 
Christian Church ; a task which naturally commends itself to 
the liberal mind. But it seems to us that, besides misplacing 
the sphere in which that influence took effect, he also much ex- 
aggerates the importance of the data on which he relies to 
prove the dependence of Christianity on Greek speculation. 
So far as we have observed he makes no express or categorical 
statement of his views on the subject, but from the passage we 
have quoted, and many others of a like tendency, he seems to 
come near to the opinion expressed by Prof. Max Miiller in 
his address to the Oriental Congress, 1892, that "Christianity is 
the quickening of the old Semitic (Jewish) faith, by the highest 
philosophical inspirations of the Aryan, and more particularly 



204 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of the Greek mind." It may be thought by some that such an 
opinion is inconsistent with Dr. Hatch's views at other points, 
and with his general attitude towards Christianity. But our 
studies have led us frequently to observe that consistency is 
not a conspicuous virtue in modern theologians of the liberal 
schools, and we are sometimes tempted to guess at the deeper- 
lying tendency of their thoughts from incidental indications of it. 
There can, at all events, be no doubt as to Prof. Max M tiller's 
opinion. Language such as his just quoted distinctly minimizes 
the great part played by Jesus in the origin of Christianity, 
the role which fell to him, or rather was marked out for him, 
by his consciousness of spiritual power and insight, as well as 
by his perception of the degraded state to which religion had 
sunk among his countrymen, and of the fact that the ultimate 
ground of that degeneracy lay in the legal spirit of the Mosaic 
institution. It is true that, provided we have in Christianity 
the absolute form of religion, and can verify it in our experi- 
ence, it matters little by what channel it has come to us. But 
in our view simple justice requires us to acknowledge that it 
was Jesus who " quickened " Jewish faith by his profound and 
original apprehension of the religious relation. Apart from 
this great achievement of his, Christianity could never have 
come into existence, the " inspiring " influences of Greek philo- 
sophy notwithstanding. What Greek philosophy really did 
was to contribute, along with Jewish thought, to the building 
up of dogma, or of that system of thought which seeks to 
rationalize, that is, to explain the ultimate fact of the divine 
nature, the ground of the evangelical idea, as set forth by Jesus ; 
which, just because it was an ultimate fact, admitted really of 
no explanation, but only of being verified, and that too not by 
philosophical speculation, but by the personal experience of 
those who surrender themselves to the influence of the idea. 
The moral element of Christianity was in great measure com- 
mon both to Aryan and Semitic thought. But to Jesus belongs 
the undivided glory of rising from the legal to the evangelic 
form of the religious relation; to a height that is so far above 
the region of religious thought, whether Aryan or Semitic, that 
it is to this day with difficulty attained even by his professed 
followers. Greek thought, i.e., such of it as contributed to the 
building up of dogma is, like dogma itself, if not fallen dead at the 
present day, only of pedagogic, and therefore of vanishing value. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 205 

The later stoicism — a slowly ripened product of Greek thought, 
the best elements of which it had absorbed into itself — became 
for its professors, towards the end of the Republic and in the 
early days of the Empire, a religion parallel in many of its 
aspects to Christianity. But while its ideal of life was scarcely 
less lofty than that of the latter, it made no provision for the 
sense of human shortcoming. In its system it gave no place 
to the forgiveness of sin, or for anything corresponding to 
that, and it knew only of amendment for the future. Owing 
mainly to this defect the stoic's devotion to the ideal was 
not irradiated by any joyful emotion. The conflict with his 
lower nature, to which the ideal summoned him, had to be 
carried on in the gloomy watchful spirit of legalism without 
any foregleam of anticipated victory. He might be sustained 
in the conflict by the stern enthusiasm for duty, but this was 
a principle which failed to make life for him otherwise than 
hard and devoid of the sense of happiness. This was apparent 
even in the case of Marcus Aurelius, its greatest disciple, of 
whom it has been justly said by Archdeacon Wilson, that it 
" is difficult to see that he could have been a better man had 
he been a Christian," but that he might have been a happier 
man, inasmuch as his meditations everywhere show that he 
" found no happiness in his religion." 

Roman stoicism gave no support or encouragement to the 
irresolute, desponding, conscience-stricken struggler. It knew 
nothing of the strength or joy which comes to a lower nature 
from being in conscious sympathy with a higher. It was " a 
religion only for the strong " and the self-reliant, for men like 
Cato, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. A system so little 
helpful to common human nature, so unsatisfactory to common 
human cravings, could only survive for a time within a limited 
circle, and as a fact it soon ceased to have a separate following. 
But, on the contrary, the doctrine taught by Jesus of the 
Fatherhood of God, who forgives the greatest sins, charged 
religion with emotion, heightened for men generally by the 
interpretation which his disciples put upon his martyr death. 
It thus gained a permanent hold of the human mind, and 
created a bond of sympathy between his followers which served 
as a principle of organization and stability. 

Turning back now (after this digression) to the doctrine of 
Jesus respecting the Fatherhood of God, we remark that the 



206 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

novelty of his doctrine consisted in attaching to it not merely 
the note of universalism, but also the note of prevenience, or, 
let us say, its independence of external impulse. Like that of 
an earthly father, the love of our Heavenly Father is founded in 
His nature ; it seeks our welfare from the first before we have 
done anything to deserve it, and persists after we have done 
everything to make it forfeit; and before all else, it is this view 
of divine love which trains us to the love of Him. In words 
which are striking in themselves, and remarkable for us from 
their close bearing on much which is advanced in this essay, it 
has been said by a living author that " divine pardon is not 
something to be waited for, or striven after, a blessing depend- 
ent upon something that must precede it, it has not to be 
created by us or by anybody else for us through the exercise 
of faith or offer of atonement, but it is already, and has been all 
along, original and fundamental in the relation of God with 
man ; and one of the uses and aims of Christ is to make known 
and certify by revealing the Father, what, but for his revelation, 
sin-confused natures would never have guessed, having, indeed, 
surmised quite the contrary, and what, even with his revelation, 
they yet find it hard to entertain and rest in. By this man 
is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins." With some 
qualification, which need not be dwelt upon, of the latter part 
of this quotation, we can accept of it as a just representation of 
Christ's doctrine of divine placability and love. According to 
this view God is the spring of love, as He is the spring of life. 
To Him belongs the initiative by the supreme privilege of His 
nature; and that, which in Him, the Infinite, is self-originated, 
underived, and unbegotten, comes in the finite creature at the 
call or conception of that love after it has refused to come at 
the command of interest or duty. That we do not need to 
propitiate God's favour is the very essence of that conception. 
It is ours already without that and before that. God seeks 
and wooes our confidence before all our doings and deservings. 
He forgives to the uttermost. He is not alienated from us by 
our past failures, and He does not look with disfavour on our 
honest efforts, however feeble and uncertain, at repentance and 
newness of life. A conviction of this truth is our encourage- 
ment to aim at the ideal in spite of our constant short-comings, 
our Sisyphus-like failures, and our slow progress towards the 
goal. This conviction is, in fact, the highest help and en- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 207 

couragement which we can have with due respect to our 
rational nature, in our advance in the spiritual life : the 
strongest incentive in our effort to deliver ourselves from 
evil. It places us in the most favourable position for carry- 
ing on our spiritual conflict, it reinforces the attractive power 
of the ideal, which is common to all men, and makes it to pre- 
vail over the material and unideal forces of evil. Whereas, 
to suppose that our higher nature, which just consists in that 
ideal principle, can be reinforced by the supernatural and ex- 
traneous action of another spirit or presence within us, is 
to break down the hedge of our personality, to destroy the 
rational character of our moral discipline and development, and 
to reduce it to a semi-physical or mechanical process, and 
finally to revert, as nearly as may be, to the Pharisaic or 
Judaic idea, that the goal of humanity may be reached or 
brought near by a miraculous interposition ; an idea, which, 
it is to be feared, exercises a materializing and paralyzing 
influence upon much of the Christianity of the present day, 
and needs to be remedied by a return to the pure and 
spiritual doctrine of Jesus. At all events, we can hardly 
question the existence, or refuse to recognize the influence of 
this idea at the present day, when we find Keble defining the 
Church as " a supernatural body, separated from the world 
to live a supernatural life, begun, continued, and ended in 
miracles " ; and a living expert in theology of a kind defining 
grace as " a life poured in from the outside." 

If a mystical element is essential to religion, no one can 
say that it is not provided in the doctrine of Jesus as now pre- 
sented. The idea of the selfless, aboriginal love of God, which 
forms the centre of his doctrine, opens up a field in which 
mystical contemplation may lose itself for ever. But we are 
none the less inclined to think that, owing to its practical 
nature, the religion of Jesus does not give much encourage- 
ment to the otiose play of mystical feeling any more than 
to the use of vain repetitions in prayer, or to the practice 
of inordinate and " perpetual adoration," away from touch 
with the duties and charities of life. 

Here, then, is the conclusion to which we have come — 
viz., that by his doctrine of the Heavenly Father, which was 
peculiarly his own, and by his doctrine of the forgiveness of 
sin, which, if not his own, was yet emphasized by him more 



208 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

than by the sages and prophets of Israel, Jesus may be 
said to have placed the relation subsisting between God and 
man not indeed upon a new footing, but in a new light. 
These doctrines, which are really one and the same, are but 
the theistic interpretation of a profound experience ; the 
translation into the language of emotion and religion of a 
common but recondite law of human nature, viz., that, if we 
turn from our sins, the memory of them ceases to lie as a 
burden on our conscience, and from being an obstacle, becomes 
a stimulus to our upward progress. This law of our nature 
was viewed by Jesus as an indication of the will of God — 
the Author of our constitution — that our sins should not 
retain dominion over us ; and that, instead of thwarting our 
efforts at self-deliverance from the evil, He sides and sympa- 
thizes with them. When so interpreted this law is what, 
above all else, rouses into activity the religious sensibilities 
of our nature, and forms our great encouragement to struggle 
against our downward tendencies, to cope with the difficulties 
which beset us in our ascent toward the ideal, and to begin 
anew after every failure. And it was, as we have endeavoured 
to show, not by illumination " from outside," but by an act 
of introspection, by the experience and observation of what 
took place within himself, that Jesus rose to this view of the 
religious relation. 

We have now seen that both the ideal of humanity and 
the conception of God, which form the basis and the essence 
of the teaching of Jesus, might have been arrived at by a 
dialectical and an experimental process, starting from pre- 
suppositions or beliefs which, if not held by all men in 
common, were the inheritance of the Jewish people. The 
combined process which seems, under circumstances and con- 
ditions more or less favourable, to have gone on slowly for 
ages, may have been retarded ; may have been interrupted or 
diverted into a wrong channel ; may have lost ground and 
then regained it ; and it is conceivable that at last a great 
religious genius like Jesus — profoundly versed in the records 
and traditions of his people, in which their religious ideas 
appear in many stages of development, in isolated, germinal, 
and often obscure and enigmatic forms of expression — might, 
by pondering and meditating over them, and above all by 
the fidelity and singleness of heart with which he lived up 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 209 

to whatever recommended itself to his moral and spiritual 
sense, at length bring that process to completion, and arrive 
at the pure ideal and conception which supplied the elements 
of the absolute religion, and be able by his clear exposition 
and illustration of them, as well as by his manifest devotion 
and sincerity, to imprint them indelibly on the minds of his 
followers. 

Having thus endeavoured to determine the specific doctrine 
of Jesus, so far as seems to be necessary for our purpose, we 
may pause to repeat, what has been already said incidentally, 
that there is no dogmatic element in that doctrine except 
such, if such there be, as is involved in the religious senti- 
ment itself : a proposition to which, in view of modern 
thought, we attach much importance. If, for example, the 
personality of God is presupposed in the teaching of Jesus, 
as well as in the most elementary form of the religious senti- 
ment, and if it yet be unverifiable and dogmatic, we may 
still observe that this consideration does not block the course 
of this discussion, whose object is not so much to prove the 
truth of Christianity as to trace its origin and the sources of its 
power in human life. We may, however, deny the force as 
well as the relevancy of this consideration. We contend that 
the doctrine of Jesus was purely and substantially a statement 
of the facts of his own inner consciousness, drawn from his 
personal experience, in conscious touch and converse with the 
deep ground of his spiritual nature, and therefore capable 
of verification by all who partake of his nature. His doctrine 
was that God is fatherly and exacts no more of men than 
that they turn from their sin and endeavour in sincerity to 
live up to their ideal. By cultivating such a disposition, 
and making this their aim, men are restored to inward 
harmony, or unity, which is but another name for the 
pacification of their nature with the divine principle within 
them, or with that supreme power on which they feel their 
absolute dependence ; and this is a fact of experience or of 
consciousness which may or may not involve the personality 
of that power, but it is a fact which has a truth of its own 
quite irrespective of the conclusion to which we may come on 
that point. The doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, which 
is here the crucial point in question, is, as formerly con- 
cluded, a theistic interpretation of a profound human cx- 

o 



2IO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

pcrience ; but, even if the interpretation be problematical, 
yet the experience itself, once made by the Founder of our 
faith (and no doubt by many others though more faintly), 
remains on record, an indication to all men, whatever their 
creed, that moral effort is not in vain. Yet the conviction 
is impressed on our minds by many considerations, that, 
for men generally, the higher graces of the Christian life 
can flourish only in the element of theism, in which the 
ideal serves as a warrant of divine placability, and humanity 
itself passes for a great family, of which God is the head. 

Belief in divine forgiveness, as taught by Jesus, is a principal 
part of our moral education ; and we can see that its rise and 
growth in the soul has features in common with the educative 
process generally. When the moral consciousness awakens, and 
the sense of guilt deepens in the soul, there comes along with 
it a craving for the forgiveness of that power on which we feel 
our dependence ; or, which is the same thing, for the appro- 
bation of our own higher nature. There is thus, in the normal 
course, a predisposition to believe in that divine forgiveness 
which the gospel announces. We begin our spiritual training 
by receiving the announcement with docility, just as children 
receive whatever is presented to them by their parents and 
instructors. But our faith cannot always rest on mere authority. 
At this stage it is only preparatory and transient. We have 
yet to be men in understanding, to prove all things ; to 
hold fast that only which is true, and to make it our own 
by the verification of experience. At first we cherish belief 
in forgiveness merely to relieve our sense of guilt, but as the 
moral sense becomes more sensitive and enlightened we perceive 
that that belief is only a means towards the great end of our 
moral education ; that it is of service to man only when it takes 
part in the moral process, and goes hand in hand with the 
earnest endeavour to achieve the ideal of our nature, and re- 
inforces our efforts to extricate ourselves from the evil. The 
thought dawns upon our minds that forgiveness itself is not the 
reward of our faith, but that the faith in it is our encourage- 
ment to cultivate that state of mind, and to observe that con- 
duct, which are acceptable to God. And, when, being put to 
this test, our faith makes it sensibly less difficult to lead the 
spiritual life and to resist besetting sins, it no longer rests upon 
the authority of any teacher, but has its authority within itself, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2 I I 

and stands in need of no other and no higher verification. We 
can then say, with a sense of certitude, " I believe in the for- 
giveness of sins," and we feel the truth of those profound words 
of the fourth Evangelist, " If any man will do the will of God, 
he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." We 
shall know that our sins are forgiven, as Jesus has taught us, 
no longer because he taught us, but because we have the 
witness within ourselves. To trust in divine forgiveness, and 
to derive from it a stimulus and encouragement to the better 
life, is the highest homage and worship we can pay to God. 
And here is the point where morality and religion are fused 
into one, and where the difficulty of the question as to the 
relation between these two may be said to disappear. 

We have now found what is the distinctive note or feature 
of the doctrine of Jesus. On the negative side it is, that in 
the conduct of his spiritual life man need not, or rather must 
not, entertain the hope of any divine help from outside. On 
the positive side, it is that man's help, under the given condi- 
tions, favourable or unfavourable, of his life, can only come from 
within ; that is, that within every man, as part of his natural 
endowment, there is a latent power, the divinest thing in him, 
by which he may with more or less success resist or overcome 
the opposing evil, innate or incurred, though for the most part 
with heaviness of spirit, as of a heart divided against itself and 
drawn in different directions, so that every task, however light, 
becomes a burden : a power, therefore, which needs to be 
quickened into joyful and victorious effort by the consciousness, 
with which Jesus inspired his followers, of the ever-placable 
God, who forgives the sins that are past and looks with favour 
on the feeblest efforts towards a better and an ever better life. 
We believe that whatever else Jesus may have taught, as, e.g., 
his injunction of love to one's enemies, was either not so 
peculiarly his as this was, or that it was a deduction from this 
doctrine. The orthodox Christian may think that this is a very 
defective and circumscribed account of the doctrine of Jesus, 
but for us it is inclusive of all else. Nay, we do not assume 
that even this doctrine is absolutely his own in the sense of its 
being quite original ; it is, in fact, a doctrine which smoulders 
under all forms of religion and makes them to be religions ; and 
we believe that a dim and inexplicit surmise of it has been 
as old as humanity itself, but that, by his luminous and heroic 



2 12 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

advocacy of it in word and deed, Jesus made it to pass into the 
minds of his followers, and to acquire for itself a footing there 
such as it never before had. We shall only further add, that 
this view of the factors of the religious process, caught up from 
the teaching of Jesus, appealing to our consciousness, and 
followed out to its consequences, was what first suggested to 
us a steadfast doubt as to the supernatural theory of Christ- 
ianity, which gradually settled into the deep conviction to 
which this volume gives utterance. 

It has been shown by us how, from the prophetic or 
Pharisaic level, Jesus may have wound his way upward and 
scaled the height of a new consciousness, the consciousness of 
a new religious relation, by the communication of which to his 
disciples he became the Head and Founder of a new society — 
of a new humanity. It has been pointed out, that the doctrine 
of the forgiveness of sins was a theistic interpretation of his 
profound human experience. We say a theistic interpretation, 
because he who had that experience, and was the interpreter of 
it, was himself a theist ; and in discussing the genesis of 
Christian doctrine that is all we have to think of. But in 
passing, the remark may be hazarded, that an individual im- 
bued with the pantheistic view of the universe might not only 
have had a like experience, but have also referred it to that 
unseen Power which moves through all existence and is the 
ground of our being, and also that he might have expressed his 
consciousness of that experience in language not materially 
different from what Jesus is reported in the Gospels to have 
used. In the inner forum of that consciousness the difference 
between theism and pantheism is of no account, and does not 
make itself felt. That experience may be acquired and enjoyed, 
as we have elsewhere had occasion to observe, undisturbed by 
any metaphysical question of the kind. 

Whether there be a difference between Christian ethics and 
the ethics of philosophical or common reason is a question 
which, however answered, does not vitally affect our posi- 
tion. It may or may not be demonstrable that the practical 
or the speculative reason was able to forestall the ethics of 
the gospel. It is not so much new obligations as new motives, 
or new encouragements to the good life, that we find in the 
teaching of Jesus. Still, if it be asserted, as we think it may, 
that there are certain distinctive principles or maxims in 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2 I 3 

Christian ethics, to which the " unassisted " or ordinary reason 
was never able to rise and which it can even yet only take 
upon trust, or find a verification of in the experiences of human 
life, we would place the explanation or the cause of this 
higher ethical flight of the gospel in that new conception of 
the divine character, and of the religious relation, which, as 
already shown, the profound insight and experience of Jesus 
enabled him to form. It was by his fidelity to the light 
that was in him, and by his conscious determination to live 
up to that light, that he discovered the great evangelic prin- 
ciple of divine placability, and the forgiveness of the sins 
that are past. But this principle having revealed itself to 
his mind, what more likely, or what more necessary than 
that, in consequence, the moral horizon should be widened, 
and that the standard of duty towards God and man should 
be elevated. Thus, for example, the duty of love to one's 
enemies, which is peculiar, if anything is, to the spirit of the 
gospel, is a manifest deduction from the infinite placability 
of God towards the penitent. The believer in this latter 
doctrine cannot but recognize the duty of being merciful as 
God is merciful, and of cultivating in himself a love resem- 
bling His. By way of caution, however, and to guard against 
the appearance of inconsistency with what has elsewhere 
been said, let it here be noted, that while from the bene- 
ficent disposition on the part of God, we may thus infer the 
duty of a like disposition on the part of man, we cannot 
reverse this step of reasoning and infer that the procedure 
of love on the part of God must be analogous to whatever 
is incumbent on man. There may be duties incumbent on 
the Christian to which there is nothing correspondent in God. 
This duty of love to our fellow men is measured by our 
readiness to make sacrifices on their behalf. But it cannot 
be said that God's love is measured by any act or acts of 
sacrifice on His part. A man's inherited tendencies, his early 
training, his social environment and habits of indulgence, may 
have been such as to require deep and prolonged self-denial 
in order that he may choose the right, or persevere in 
his integrity. But the Infinite knows of no such conditions. 
The duty of self-sacrifice is imposed on the rational creature 
by the finitude, the imperfection, the discord, and the division 
of his nature. But just as we have found that the Infinite 



214 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

is exempt from the possibility of error, so He is also exempt 
from the necessity of making any self-sacrifice to gain any 
object or end of His government whatever. The notion 
that out of goodness or condescension He may do anything 
which is not a necessity of His nature is inconceivable. It 
is by the manifestation or assertion, not by the sacrifice or 
suppression of Himself, that He does us good. There is a 
sense in which it may be well and truly said that Jesus 
offered himself a sacrifice for man upon the cross, but this 
act of Jesus can in no sense be spoken of as an act of self- 
devotion or of self-sacrifice on the part of God. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

HOW FAR THE DOCTRINE OF JESUS WAS ORIGINAL. 

FOR those who, with ourselves, give up the notion of special, 
z>., supernatural illumination, the much vexed question, as to 
the novelty and originality of the doctrine of Jesus, is one 
of minor and quite subordinate importance, of historical rather 
than of religious interest. But the historical interest is so 
great, and the question has been so much canvassed, that at 
the risk of some repetition, and of some interruption of the argu- 
ment, we crave indulgence while we pause to give a separate 
statement of our view on this subject. We do not for a 
moment question that the doctrine of Jesus, especially on its 
more ethical side, was anticipated at many points by previous 
teachers, and that many of his views had been accepted by the 
better minds of antiquity. Viewing him as inspired only in 
the same sense with other great teachers, as separated from 
them only in degree, and as having access to no source of 
illumination from which they were cut off, we are not con- 
cerned to make out that he made absolutely new discoveries 
in the religious sphere, and are disposed rather to regard his 
doctrine as the outcome of a great development to whose 
absolute beginning we cannot ascend, and many of whose 
intermediate steps we cannot trace with any clearness or 
certainty. There may not be a saying of his, whether moral 
or religious, whether relating to man's duty and destiny, or 
to God's dealings with man, but had its counterpart, parallel 
or forecast, somewhere in the great body of pre-Christian 
literature, classical or oriental, prophetic or rabbinical. There 
may not be a petition in his form of prayer, nor a sentence 
in his Sermon on the Mount, which may not admit of being 



2l6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

compared with some detached sentence of nearly equivalent 
meaning from Greek philosopher or dramatist, from oriental 
sage or Jewish rabbi. We may depend upon it that the 
most central and important truths, which are associated with 
his name or referred to his teaching, had dawned, however 
vaguely, however fitfully and partially, on many prophetic 
spirits before his day. While making this concession, how- 
ever, we may still claim for the doctrine of Jesus the character 
of novelty and originality, unless, indeed, we go the length of 
denying that there can be such a thing in the evolution of 
human thought. For we may ask, with E. von Hartmann, 
who does his best to dispute the originality of the doctrine 
of Jesus, " What doctrine could be regarded as new and 
original, in respect of all mankind, even if it were so in 
respect to the individual or to a particular nation, and how 
little of novelty remains in the doctrines of the most celebrated 
teachers if we deduct from them all that has been uttered 
or foreshadowed in preceding ages?" 

It will be seen that we do not seek to exaggerate the 
originality of the doctrine of Jesus ; but we would guard 
against the opposite tendency to depreciate or ignore it 
altogether. This latter tendency is fostered by the neglect 
or oversight of those aspects which differentiate the sayings 
and doctrines of Jesus from those of other teachers which 
bear a general resemblance to them. In many cases the 
parallelism is only superficial, or not so close as it appears 
at first sight. For an example in point take Jesus' version 
of the Golden Rule. The criticism may seem to be minute 
and microscopical ; but it cannot be altogether accidental of 
without significance that his formulation of that rule differs 
materially from that ascribed to Hillel, Confucius, and others. 
Theirs was, " Do not .to others what you would not wish 
them to do to you." But his was, " Whatsoever ye would 
that others should do to you, do ye to them likewise." 
Now between that negative and this positive version the 
distinction is wide. It is a distinction not verbal merely, 
or accidental, but correspondent to that which obtains 
generally between the legal standpoint, which is common to 
all ethical-religious systems, and the evangelical standpoint : 
between the law which came by Moses and the grace 
which came by Jesus. So, too, the record has been pre- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2 I 7 

served of many striking sentences by such men as Hillel, 
Gamaliel, Antigonus of Sochoh, and others, which show 
that they had glimpses of some higher form of religion than 
the mere mechanical observance of the legal statutes. And 
advantage has been taken of such sayings by Renan and 
Von Hartmann to prove that there was little novel in the 
doctrine of Jesus ; that in its origin Christianity was little 
else than Judaism ; and by Jewish scholars to show that 
the ethics of the gospel are the same as appear in the 
Talmud. But it has been well observed by Kuenen that 
these sayings, however they may be multiplied, present a 
strange contrast to the rigid legalism which was the essence 
and enduring characteristic of Jewish teaching. The Jewish 
doctors either did not perceive the full range and effect of 
the more spiritual view, or had not the courage and mental 
force to draw the proper inference from it — viz., the relative, 
if not the absolute unimportance of mere forms when the 
substance was present. That Jesus was able to do this 
places him on quite another plane from that occupied by 
all the Jewish teachers of that age. 

Another striking example will suffice to show that there 
may be much verbal or superficial similarity between maxims 
or principles which are yet far from being identical or even 
approximate in practical tendency, and in general spirit. The 
passive virtues which are in a great measure common both 
to Christianity and to Buddhism are in the latter founded 
on a pessimistic view of life, the negation of all incentive to 
an active and hopeful effort to stem or remedy its evils. 
Whereas, in the former, these same nominally identical virtues 
take the form of resignation to the will of God, and are 
found to be consistent with the most strenuous remedial 
efforts. The difference here is great, and is fully accounted 
for by the fact that Buddha did not, but that Jesus did, 
proceed, as we have shown, to translate the ethical doctrine 
into the language of religion. 

The reader should bear in mind that it is the doctrine of 
Jesus as a consistent whole which we affirm to be unique 
and novel. To assert that anything like the doctrine of 
Jesus as a whole, or anything approaching it, was ever pro- 
mulgated before his time, is little short of an affront to 
human judgment. And even if we were to suppose that to 



2 18 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

construct that unity he applied an eclectic method to the 
religious literature of all ages and countries, with which he 
had somehow gained an extensive and profound acquaintance, 
he would still deserve to be regarded as the greatest religious 
teacher whom the world has ever seen, for what he put 
aside, and for what he chose out or emphasized from the 
mass of unrelated and undigested thought which had thus 
been presented to his mind. Viewed as a whole, his moral 
standard and his conception of God are widely separated from 
every doctrine which preceded it, as well as from all that 
could be gathered from acquaintance with the best which 
men had thought or written in all previous ages, unless he 
had brought with him an electric touch to fuse the dispersed 
and often discordant thoughts into organic unity. There 
must have been, what Goethe said of Carlyle, a " basis of 
his own," a central principle contributed by himself, some 
individuality of judgment and of insight, to guide him in 
framing and building up the system which goes by his name. 
And if it be asked wherein that basis, that principle lay, we 
reply without hesitation that it lay in his consciousness of 
the new or evangelic idea of the religious relation. This 
idea, though it may have dawned faintly on many minds, 
was never able to secure for itself an established residence 
in the thoughts of men till Jesus rose to the clear vision of 
it, and gave it forth to the world. It was emphatically his 
own. For elsewhere we have seen that Roman stoicism, 
the highest product of the religious spirit of Greece, missed 
or fell short of the idea of divine forgiveness which is essential 
to that relation, and that the Jews never could dissociate 
from it the idea of propitiation ; so that nowhere do we find 
this idea in its purity except in the teaching of Jesus. We 
say, therefore, that by the clear utterance of this idea he 
crowned the edifice of religious thought which had been 
the growth of ages. This he did consciously in respect of 
Jewish thought, and unwittingly in respect of Gentile thought. 
On the ground of this idea alone we rest the novelty of his 
doctrine ; and the novelty is greater than it seems, for it is 
pre-eminently one of those ideas which have issues far beyond 
themselves. It left nothing standing as it was ; it gave a 
fresh significance to old truths, and revolutionized the religious 
sentiment of man. Simply by his view of our relation to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 219 

God, Jesus renewed our relation to each other, he gave a 
new complexion to human duty, and changed the current of 
human history. 

A relative novelty is all that we claim for the doctrine 
of Jesus, and, if we consider it well, we shall perceive that 
nothing more than this can possibly attach to the moral and 
spiritual teaching of him or of any other man. For what is 
and must be all true ethical and religious teaching but the 
interpretation of moral and religious instincts, which are 
fundamental and germinant in all men. What can possibly 
distinguish the teaching of Jesus except its more developed 
presentation of the principles of natural religion ? The highest 
claim which his teaching can possibly advance is that it is 
the purest interpretation of these instincts, the highest de- 
velopment of that religion. All true teachers have come 
more or less upon the same lines of thought, and the religion 
of Jesus is superior to other forms, only in so far as it con- 
tains elements of natural religion beyond what they do, or 
has taken into account and embodied elements which those 
others overlooked or but partially apprehended, and has 
pursued the intimations of the religious instinct beyond the 
point at which they stopped short. Strange, indeed, had it 
been, had other teachers not anticipated Jesus at many points, 
or not had transient glimpses of what he more steadily dis- 
cerned, or not approached or come within sight of the eleva- 
tion on which he stood. 

The central principles of the doctrine of Jesus have been, 
we believe, more or less anticipated by all the great founders 
of religion who have appeared in various ages, and in various 
regions of the earth. They are the only principles by which 
religion can be raised above being a thing of mere ritual, 
and worship, and dogma ; the religious nature of man pro- 
foundly stirred, and respect awakened for the higher instincts, 
as intimations of the will of God. But owing to their very 
nearness, their simplicity and spirituality, these principles are 
recondite, and apt to be misunderstood, overlaid, and perverted. 

It is an accepted canon of historical criticism, not only that 
no great truth comes abruptly upon the world, but also that the 
man who perceives the full significance of an old but immature 
idea, and reveals its bearing on life and practice, is more en- 
titled to the praise of originality than those are who have come 



2 20 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

upon the traces of it, but have not possessed the intellectual 
force or insight to bring it fully to light, and have failed to 
discover its important place in relation to the general system of 
human thought. History has many instances to show in which 
ideas have floated for ages -in the general mind of humanity, 
and have exercised a sort of fascination, as if something might 
possibly be made of them, but which yet have remained 
little more than dormant in the limbo of fancy and of vague 
speculation until some more powerful mind, favoured by 
opportunity or by development in other spheres of thought, 
has discovered their true significance and thrown them into 
clear expression, and obtained for them a settled place in the 
fabric of human knowledge. 

While, then, we regard Jesus as a most original teacher, we 
also acknowledge that it would be a great exaggeration to say 
that his teaching was absolutely original. It had been strange 
indeed, or rather wholly abnormal and unaccountable, had he 
made an absolutely new beginning, an absolutely new appeal 
to the religious instincts, or had suddenly opened up an en- 
tirely new vein of ethical or religious thought. We rather 
welcome the thought, that many of his ideas had suggested 
themselves to the higher minds of our race. That he had 
received into himself a rich inheritance from the past, and that 
his was an original, because it was also a receptive nature, is 
what we do not question. Our position is, that the ideas which 
underlie all his teaching, while they had germinated in many of 
the highest minds of our species, did in him alone coalesce and 
blossom into that ideal of humanity and that conception of 
God which he offered as an instruction to his disciples, with 
the express design of lifting their life, and laying through them 
the basis of a new religion and of a better form of society. 
Still, in considering the genesis of the doctrine of Jesus as a 
distinctive system, it must not be forgotten that we have not a 
tittle of evidence that he was in any way indebted for it to 
Hellenic, or even Judaeo-Hellenic literature or philosophy. 
The diffusion of these, by their comparatively full development 
of the moral consciousness, and by the many elements akin to 
Christianity which they contained, may have materially pre- 
pared the way for its subsequent rapid propagation. But to 
say that such elements ever came from these sources into 
contact with the mind of Jesus, or contributed a factor to his 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 22 1 

moral development, is quite another thing. It has been said, 
and, we believe, well and justly, that he was " a Jew from head 
to foot," touched by no influences, acquainted with no literature, 
but those of his own people and country. His moral conscious- 
ness was formed by the teachings of the legislators and prophets 
of Israel, and by his acquaintance with synagogal and Pharisaic 
doctrine and usage, till it could stand erect in its own strength 
and lay its line of judgment on all alike, and recognize their 
defects and shortcomings. For it is often thus, that the pupil 
passes beyond the sphere of his teachers, and rises, above the 
system in which he has been educated, to a higher level of 
thought. The mental development of Jesus proceeded not by 
the discovery of any absolutely new truths, but by the fuller 
recognition of elements which were germinant in the moral 
consciousness of men, and by the emphatic prominence which 
he gave to elements which, till then, had lain in the background ; 
so imparting new significance to much, and revolutionizing the 
whole field of religious thought. 

To be fair and candid, we must estimate the force and 
originality of the genius of Jesus, as we have done, by con- 
trasting and comparing his doctrine with that of the accredited 
teachers of his own day and country. It is evident that he 
was profoundly versed in the prophetic literature of a former 
age, and that, to a large extent, this circumstance may account 
for his superiority to many of the notions prevalent around 
him ; the marvel being, that with such a splendid literature — 
the product of a high spiritual insight — in their hands, and 
read in their synagogues every Sabbath day, the Jews of that 
age could be satisfied with the doctrine of the contemporary 
teachers ; that he alone broke away from Pharisaic leading 
strings, and took up again the thread which had dropped from 
prophetic hands. At the same time, we feel that we are in a 
new atmosphere, even when we pass from the study of prophetic 
literature to that of the Gospels, and that the religious idea is 
nowhere presented by any of the prophets, or by all of them 
together, with the same purity and uniform consistency as in 
the teaching of Jesus. It would seem, therefore, that we are 
thrown upon the personality and religious genius of himself to 
account for the highly developed presentment of the religious 
principle which we find there. 

There is, as we have shown, little or no indication that Jesus 



222 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

was indebted for his doctrine to Gentile speculation ; the 
parallelisms between it and this not amounting to much. But 
that he was indebted to the remains of prophetic literature 
there can be no doubt ; and the question arises, by what avenue 
these latter may have been brought into contact with his mind? 
And we feel that we cannot summarily dismiss the conjecture 
that he did not stand quite alone in his reaction against the 
Judaism of his time, or in his reverting to the prophetic spirit 
of the earlier age. We are confessedly ignorant of the more 
intimate conditions which called his native qualities into action. 
It may be that his religious views were formed under the in- 
fluence and in the atmosphere created by a small group of 
kindred spirits, who, in his day, represented an unbroken 
succession, running back in slender and inconspicuous line to 
prophetic times, and preserving the tradition of that more 
spiritual religion, which, in the best times, would seem to have 
been confined to a small minority of the Jewish people ; to 
have disappeared from the synagogue, and to have died out of 
the hearts of the accredited teachers of the people. If there 
was such a group or circle — the existence of which is ante- 
cedently not improbable — we need not look for it among the 
Pharisees, and still less among the Sadducees : and the only 
other section of the people being that of the Essenes, who 
certainly were dissident from the common Judaism, of which 
the Pharisees were the main representatives, the question arises, 
how far it is probable that such a group or circle may have 
existed within the Essene communities? Considering the dis- 
tinctly marked element which these formed in the population, 
the number of their settlements scattered over the land, and the 
contact, at many points, of their doctrine and mode of life with 
the teaching of Jesus, it does appear to be a singular circum- 
stance, not easily to be accounted for, that no allusion is ever 
made to them in the Gospels. The observation, that they are 
never once named in the Talmud, does not afford a parallel to 
this omission on the part of the Evangelists. 

The silence of the Talmudists was in all probability a cal- 
culated silence, expressive of their contempt for what they 
regarded as a miserable sect ; a contempt which would be 
heightened by the fact, if fact it is, as surmised by Lightfoot, 
that after the destruction of Jerusalem the Essenes went over 
in a body to swell the Christian Church. The silence of the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 223 

Gospels has by some authors been construed into a proof or 
consequence of the close connection in which Jesus stood to 
these communities, as arising out of the desire of the Evangelists 
to conceal this fact, and affording ground for the suspicion that 
Christianity was little more than an expansion or modified 
form of Essenism. But the more likely explanation is that the 
Evangelists felt it necessary only to call attention to the opposi- 
tion which Jesus encountered, and naturally took little notice 
of the countenance and help which he received, or of surround- 
ing influences like those of Essenism which were more or 
less favourable to his enterprise. It may readily be supposed 
that the Essenes, not being actively opposed to Jesus, might be 
passed over in the tradition as being on his side (Mark ix. 40). 
The existence among the Essenes of such a hidden, obscure, 
and little-heeded band as we here suppose, has some probability 
given to it by the notices, preserved in the Gospels, of John the 
Baptist, of Anna the prophetess, and of the aged Simeon. The 
ascetic habit of John's life was strange to ordinary Jewish 
notions, and suggests his possible connection with the Essenes; 
while the prophetic gifts which these people affected to cultivate 
may account for the reputation which Anna enjoyed, and it 
might be said of them in a very special sense, as of Simeon, 
that they " waited for the consolation of Israel," inasmuch as 
they did not idly wait like the Pharisees, by merely conforming 
to the statutory ordinances of Israel, but sought by their system 
of self-discipline to prepare themselves for the coming era. Not 
that we attach much weight to such considerations, or think the 
hypothesis here made .to be of much importance ; for, let the 
relation be what it may in which Jesus stood to the Essene 
communities, whether one of absolute neutrality or of relative 
dependence, we have shown elsewhere that in no case could it 
suffice to explain Jesus, or supply us, so to speak, with the 
equation of the man. But we cannot help the feeling that but 
for some such hypothesis as the above of the connection of 
Jesus with some group or circle of which no record has been 
preserved, Jesus would come before us as a man without father 
or mother, in the spiritual sense of the word, and as having 
spontaneously taken up the broken thread of prophetic tradition 
after it had, as a living tradition, been lost for ages. What we 
know of rabbinical literature hardly warrants us in regarding it 
as the conductor of that tradition. But it would be contrary to 



2 24 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

general analogy to suppose that continuity had been completely 
broken, or that an entirely new beginning was made, unless, 
indeed, we choose to regard Christianity as a renascence due to 
the material transmission into new conditions of the document- 
ary memorials of a past age. As there were Reformers before 
the Reformation, so, we doubt not, there were Christians before 
Christianity took its place among established institutions; and 
we are disposed to regard its Founder as the successor of the 
prophetic line of Israel : as, in some measure, the last and 
greatest of the prophets who was able to complete their work 
and testimony, because he inherited their views from acquaint- 
ance with their writings ; and also, it may be, from his connec- 
tion with such a small circle as we suppose, which had inherited 
through forgotten links a tradition of the spirit in which the 
prophets lived and wrote ; of which, too, by his commanding 
figure and imposing personality, he became the central and 
presiding genius, besides that he infused fresh life into the 
lingering tradition, and gave to it a new start and development. 
The records which have come down to us, if they do not 
encourage, can scarcely be said to exclude such a conjecture. 

But even from this point of view, we still regard Jesus as a 
great religious genius who rose above his surroundings ; who had 
the faculty of gathering up all the straggling lights of prophecy 
into one focus, and transmitting them in new and concentrated 
power to the coming age ; as one whose deep insight thus gained 
into the nature of God and man, enabled him to throw light 
upon the relation subsisting between the human and divine ; as 
one, moreover, who by his heroic character and his tragic end 
stamped the memory of his life and teaching in indissoluble 
union on the minds of his disciples, and sent it rolling onwards, 
to gather into itself all such cross fertilizing elements as could 
enter into combination with it, and so imparted a new impulse 
and character both of good and evil to human life and destiny. 
He was as little a prophet as he was a poet in the narrower 
sense of the word, for he was, more truly than John the Baptist, 
greater than a prophet. The struggle which characterizes the 
prophet was past for him before he showed himself to the world. 
He had entered into the full possession of truths to which to 
the end the prophets rose with difficulty, and he was able to 
proclaim in the most simple and axiomatic form, both by word 
and deed, what they could only express by symbolic action, or 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 225 

utter in dark sayings, in figurative language, and in detached 
sayings above the ordinary level of their thoughts. While they 
felt as if they were but the mouthpiece of a higher intelligence, 
and were carried out of themselves, he did but give utterance 
and articulation to the deep moral and religious instincts of his 
own bosom ; a reason why he spoke with such calmness and 
manifest depth of conviction as to carry his doctrine " with 
authority " to the hearts of his disciples. 

From our anxiety to vindicate the relative originality of the 
thought and teaching of Jesus, it must not be inferred that we 
attach to these an undue or exclusive importance. We do, in- 
deed, attach to them a very great importance, because we take 
for granted that all right action depends on right thinking, and 
because we believe in the power of ideas. But we are far from 
supposing that articulate speech is the only vehicle for the 
transmission of ideas, or that these are disseminated by dis- 
course only. There is a medium more impalpable ,than 
language by which they pass from mind to mind, and they 
may stir the heart and move the springs of action before 
they reach the understanding. Ideas may be implied when 
they are not expressed, and may act upon minds which are not 
conscious of their presence, or are even repelled by the formal 
statement of them. But no matter whether it be explicit or 
inexplicit, the right view of things must be present in order to 
the right dealing with them. In Jesus himself thought and 
impulse to action were at one, and the thought, which he en- 
deavoured to communicate to his disciples, as the medium for 
imparting impulse and influencing life, was communicated, in 
part at least, through his own manner of acting and suffering, or 
through the life which he led quite as much as by the form and 
substance of his oral teaching. His discourses would probably 
have made but a slight impression on his hearers, had he not 
also acted what he taught, amid circumstances which tested his 
sincerity to the utmost ; and so gained an influence on the 
sympathies of many witnesses. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THAT JESUS CLAIMED TO BE THE MESSIAH. 

We endeavoured to show in a former chapter that Jesus neither 
regarded himself as a Redeemer, nor uttered anything to 
encourage his disciples to regard him in that light. But we 
now advance to the remark, that it is no less certain to our 
minds that he regarded himself as the promised Messiah, and 
gave his sanction to that belief on the part of his disciples : 
differing entirely in this respect from John the Baptist, who, 
while he looked for a Messiah, yet declined to apply the name 
to himself. Undoubtedly, the belief in the Messiahship of 
Jesus, however it originated in the minds of his followers, must 
have exercised a prodigious influence, and have lent a force to 
his words and a sanctity to his person beyond that, which, but 
for it, they could possibly have had. It was, indeed, a circum- 
stance, the importance of which can hardly be exaggerated. 
For it is universally acknowledged, that unless the Messianic 
faith had connected itself with the person of Jesus, and unless 
the accumulated sanctities of the old religion had thus been 
laid claim to by the new, the latter could never have main- 
tained itself in face of the opposition which it encountered at the 
first, nor have found a soil prepared for its reception in so many 
hearts. The existence of the Messianic hope in Israel was fitted 
to be either an insuperable obstacle or a great furtherance to 
the teacher of a new religion, differing materially from Judaism, 
or running counter to the current national ideas ; an obstacle to 
the teacher who could not assert his claim to be the Messiah, 
a furtherance to one who could. It was the cause of deter- 
mined unbelief in the mass of the Jewish people ; it lent ardour 
and enthusiasm to the faith of the disciples. 



NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2 27 

The most probable account of the origin in the minds of his 
disciples of this belief in the Messiahship of Jesus, is that he 
himself participated in this belief and gave it his sanction. The 
common, orthodox explanation of this remarkable circumstance 
is either that he was conscious of his Messianic character by- 
virtue of his divine nature, or that he was favoured with some 
mysterious communication from heaven to that effect. As to 
this explanation and the data on which it is founded, we 
shall only remark that when examined critically, and apart 
from any preconceived ideas on the subject, the prodigies 
which are recorded in the Gospels as having attended his birth, 
and the voice and vision which accompanied his baptism, 
appear to be nothing but the pious fancies or inventions of the 
circle of early disciples, who were unable to conceive such a 
thing as an inner warrant, and could only imagine that the 
secret of his mission had been broken to him by some com- 
munication addressed to the outer sense. On the very face of 
them the records contain indications that no such prodigies 
occurred. Among these indications is the fact that these 
alleged prodigies left no impression on the dwellers in the districts 
where they are said to have occurred, and did not influence the 
treatment which Jesus afterwards received. They awakened no 
expectation of his future greatness, and were entirely forgotten, 
it would seem, even by his mother and other relatives (see 
Mark iii. 2 1 ). That no trace of any surviving memory of these 
events occurs in the narratives is enough to show that, like 
many other legends, the evangelical tradition grew up piece- 
meal, without regard to that unity and consistency which the 
pragmatism of real history requires. 

But, indeed, any supernatural explanation of the Messianic 
consciousness of Jesus is wholly inadmissible, and we must seek 
for another more consonant to the general principles which 
guide us in this inquiry. And with this in view, we start from 
the unquestionable fact that he did not, from the commence- 
ment of his ministry, give himself out to be the Messiah. The 
synoptic narratives convey the impression that until St. Peter's 
confession at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus never spoke of himself as 
the Christ, and was never acknowledged or recognized as such 
by his disciples. Of this " remarkable reticence " of Jesus at 
the commencement of his public life, regarding his claim to be 
the Messiah, the best explanation by apologetic theologians 



2 28 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

which we have seen is, that " his conception of the Messianic 
King was not that which was current among his countrymen ; 
that the word ' Christ ' did not mean the same thing to his 
hearers as to himself, and that it was difficult to use it without 
fostering opinions he did not share, and encouraging hopes he 
knew to be delusive." Some exception might be taken to this 
explanation, but it is ingenious, and from the apologetic point 
of view, satisfactory enough. We shall, therefore, content our- 
selves with simply putting our own construction of the facts 
over against it. 

In our view Jesus delayed his claim to be the Messiah, not out 
of reticence or any species of economy in his teaching, but rather 
owing to the circumstance that he had for a time no absolute 
certainty as to the fact. There is no evidence in the synoptists 
that his " plan " was matured from the first ; or, when he 
announced that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, that he 
even considered the advent of a Messiah to be necessary for its 
establishment. Indeed, his idea of the kingdom as being 
within men, and as coming without observation, was somewhat 
at variance with that of a Messiah, and that he should, in 
the ardour and freshness of the former, overlook, or put aside, 
the thought of the latter, even if it seemed to be implied in the 
prophetic books of the Old Testament, is not to be wondered 
at. What we do know with some degree of certainty is, as we 
have already seen, that while many waited for the consolation 
of Israel, for the advent of a Messiah, he felt that they had no 
need to wait, but taught them to abandon the expectant 
attitude, and implied that no messenger from heaven was needed 
to give the signal for the inauguration of the kingdom. The 
spirit of his announcement was that, come when the Messiah 
might, there was no need to wait even for him. Men could 
not tell when he was to come, they could not hasten his com- 
ing. It was an event over which they had no control, but they 
might exercise, without delay, the power which they did have 
of entering the kingdom of God ; it being present in the midst 
of them, though no Messiah had as yet made his appearance. 
In stepping forward with a declaration to this effect, he gave a 
transcendent proof of his confidence in the self-sufficing 
authority of the human spirit to itself — an authority before 
which the most sacred and time-honoured beliefs had to bend 
and give way. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2 29 

His assumption, at a later period, of the Messianic char- 
acter was an afterthought, for which we can account without 
derogating from his truthfulness, or from the sanity and 
sobriety of his mind, as also without the supposition of any 
supernatural authentication of it to himself. We conceive that, 
as the grand and fundamental significance of his doctrine con- 
cerning the kingdom of God made itself more and more felt 
by him, the thought might gradually suggest itself to his 
mind, that he himself might be the predicted Messiah. The 
fact of his clearly perceiving and distinctly announcing that 
the highest life of man did not depend on the advent of a 
Messiah, or on any outward manifestation, might disclose itself 
to him as a title to regard himself as the Messiah ; not such, 
indeed, as his contemporaries looked for, hardly even such as 
prophets had imaged and yearned for, but one who surpassed 
their hopes and would more than fulfil their expectations. 
The consciousness that he was the sole bearer to man of a 
vital truth which the whole prophetic line had missed, was 
enough to satisfy him that he could, without presumption, 
appropriate the title of Messiah to himself. He had dis- 
covered the perpetual presence in the earth of that kingdom 
of God, of which men hitherto had been unconscious or un- 
observant, and also the way by which men might become 
members of it ; that a change of mind and not of circumstance 
was the remedy for human ills. No higher truths than these 
had ever been discovered ; none more capable of creating a 
new current in the world's history, and of heaving the re- 
ligious life to a higher level. Then, he realized to himself 
that, as sole depositary of these great truths, he occupied a 
unique position in the world ; he could not but feel that the 
cause of humanity rested with him, and the thought might 
well suggest itself to his mind, that he might be the Messiah 
of whom the prophets spoke. 

But to this inner warrant for such a thought came also an 
outer warrant. The effect of his ministry in elevating the 
mind and character of his disciples would lend force to the 
idea. That this was so seems to be implied in the answer 
which he gave to John's inquiry, " Art thou he that should 
come, or do we look for another ? " He did not answer the 
question categorically, but, indirectly or problematical 1}-, in 
words which seem to show that he had weighed this very 



230 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

question in his own mind. " Go and show John again those 
things which ye do hear and see, the blind receive their sight 
and the lame walk," etc., i.e., that John may see whether the 
works which I do do not fulfil, and more than fulfil, the 
words of the prophets, or whether their words should still 
lead him to expect a greater than me. The effects of his 
ministry, to which he thus drew attention, were what satisfied 
his own mind, and he appealed to them to satisfy the Baptist. 
The effects to which he pointed were the spiritual effects of 
his doctrine, and went far beyond anything which had attended 
the preaching of John himself. The Baptist had produced 
a great commotion, and awakened lively expectations, but he 
had left the minds of men unsatisfied ; on the banks of Jordan 
he had touched the consciences and reformed the lives of many 
besides Zaccheus, but he had brought the joy and bliss of 
" salvation " to no man's house. The least of those who had 
joined themselves to the company of Jesus was greater than the 
Baptist himself. For John's teaching sanctioned that passive 
attitude, the last obstacle to all true progress in the higher 
life which Jesus sought to remove, and which, when replaced 
by an energetic surrender to the divine will, admitted to the 
soul a new light and life, to which John's disciples had neces- 
sarily remained strangers. In his reply to John's question, 
Jesus placed before him the consideration which weighed with 
himself and which he expected also to weigh with the Baptist, 
viz., that the effects of his ministry were far greater than those 
which followed the ministry of John, who announced the 
advent of the Messiah ; and that they were worthy of the 
Messiah himself. He may have felt that, come when he 
might, the Messiah could perform no greater work than the 
spiritual effects which his own doctrine was calculated to pro- 
duce, and that, in so far, prophecy found its fulfilment in 
him. And we may also suppose that the cases of moral 
therapeutic which accompanied his footsteps, however they 
may be accounted for, could not be altogether without effect 
upon his self-estimate, could not but lend additional likeli- 
hood to the suggestion that he was the Messiah. 

Still, we can readily conceive that, strong as these warrants, 
outward and inward, for applying the prophecies to himself, 
may have seemed to him to be, he may yet have seen reason 
for suspense and hesitation before he could resolve to an- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 23 I 

nounce himself to be the Messiah. The signs of Messiahship 
were not all to be seen in him. Much of the prophetic 
imagery did not plainly or literally apply to him. The 
therapeutic wonders which accompanied his preaching were 
too insignificant and of too doubtful a nature to be thought 
worthy of the Messiah. They did not satisfy the Jewish 
ideas of " a sign " ; perhaps they did not satisfy his own. No 
angelic vision, nor voice, nor communication of any kind from 
heaven had conveyed a message to him, or given him a 
warrant to assume the name, and undertake the Messianic 
role. His healthy and sober nature had preserved him from 
such an illusion. His warrant was mainly within himself — 
in his conviction of the infinite importance and significance of 
his doctrine, and in his consciousness of high resolve and moral 
power which quailed before no danger, and was equal to any 
act of self-devotion. It may also have gradually dawned upon 
him that much of the prophetic language was figurative ; that 
the notes of the Messiah, as they might be gathered from 
the Old Testament, were to be spiritually interpreted, and 
that so interpreted, they might refer to him ; that he had 
indeed raised the dead in sin and healed the sick of soul by 
rousing to life and refreshing their moral nature : an effect 
more admirable and more truly divine than if he had con- 
trolled the forces of nature, and called the dead to life again ; 
and thus forming a sort of outer warrant for his belief, that 
he was the only kind of Messiah which human needs required 
or admitted of. 

Finally, whatever hesitation might still remain, it was 
removed, we believe, by the discovery which he made at 
Caesarea Philippi, that the belief in his Messiahship had grown 
silently up in the minds of his disciples. It was not, we may 
be sure, out of mere idle curiosity, nor out of sensitiveness to 
human judgment, that Jesus, at an advanced period of his 
ministry, put the question to his disciples, " Whom do men 
say that I am, and whom do ye say that I am ? " For it is 
ever the mark of a strong man to be self-dependent, self- 
contained, and somewhat indifferent to the judgment which 
others may form of him. He may have put the question in 
order to stimulate the somewhat musing and sluggish minds 
of the disciples ; to importune or extract a confession from 
them which would reveal to them the state of their own 



232 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

feelings, and bring into full consciousness that of which they 
were already sub-conscious. The sequel shows, indeed, that 
the consciousness was already present, the utterance of it 
already upon their lips, and that the question was all that 
was needed to call it forth. But the still more probable 
explanation of the question is, that, in the persistent absence 
of any sign or communication from heaven, such as had, 
according to his devout belief, been given to the servants of 
God in other ages, there still lingered a faint doubt in his 
own mind as to his Messianic mission ; whether, that is to 
say, he was justified in assuming that, vitally and supremely 
important as his doctrine was to the highest interests of 
men, the Messianic mission had indeed fallen to him. To 
remove the last faint shadow of such a doubt, before ad- 
vancing further on the course whose fateful close he had 
begun to foresee, he may have desired to know, for the 
confirmation of his faith in himself, what impression had 
been made by his teaching and personality on the minds of 
others, especially of those who had been witnesses of his 
life and doctrine, and who judged him with the penetration 
which comes even to simple souls by familiar intercourse and 
loving insight Obviously they had long attached themselves 
to him with little or no suspicion of his being the Messiah ; 
they regarded him at most as " another " who had come in 
the spirit, and in more than the power, of John the Baptist. 
In view of the expectant state of the Jews at the time we 
must regard this slowness of apprehension on the part of the 
disciples as a proof of uncommon obtuseness and unaccount- 
able stupidity, provided, indeed, Jesus did actually perform 
the great miracles recorded of him in the Gospels,^ and 
when, at last, the truth did break upon their minds their late 
enlightenment could hardly have merited the encomium that 

* If, like John, Jesus performed no miracles, the fact that John, not- 
withstanding that the people inclined to regard him as the Messiah, had 
apparently failed to effect anything great, and had declined the Messianic 
title to himself, may have acted on the disciples of Jesus as a caution 
against being rash in holding him for the Messiah, and may help to 
explain their "slowness" of understanding. But if, as the synoptists 
unite in telling us, Jesus wrought miracles, while John did nothing of the 
sort, this backwardness on the part of the disciples is utterly incom- 
prehensible. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 233 

" flesh and blood had not revealed it to them " (Matth. xvi. 
17). It was because signs and wonders had not been forth- 
coming, and because the work and influence of Jesus had 
been altogether of a spiritual nature that he could justly 
say that not flesh and blood, but the Heavenly Father, the 
divine principle within them, had revealed the truth to 
them as to himself. In fact, they had been led to a con- 
viction of his Messiahship along the same line of thought 
and by the same indications as those to which Jesus himself 
had trusted. The confession of Peter was a grand one, just 
because it was made in the absence of every external warrant 
and proceeded from spiritual insight. But what we have 
chiefly to remark in regard to it is, that it formed a great 
turning point in the experience of Jesus himself no less than 
of his disciples. The last shadow of self-distrust vanished 
from his own mind, when he perceived that the disciples had 
been led, unsolicited and unprompted, to the very same con- 
clusion to which he himself had been led. It was with him 
as with other teachers and leaders of men. His own mind 
grew clearer ; he gained new confidence in himself and in 
his mental visions when he found them ratified, and, as it 
were, reflected back from the minds of others. One of the 
deepest thinkers of this century says that one's opinion and 
conviction gains infinitely in strength and sureness the moment 
a second mind is found to have adopted it ; and we believe 
that this observation was exemplified in the experience of 
Jesus at Caesarea Philippi. The conviction of his Messiahship, 
which thus established itself in the mind of Jesus, was not 
in the least shaken by the hostility and unbelief of the ruling 
classes, for he could not fail to perceive that the sensuous, 
carnal, and worldly expectations with which the Messianic 
hope was associated in their minds, closed them against all 
higher truth, and that the true Messiah could not but dis- 
appoint their expectations and excite their enmity. 

It has already been shown that the whole teaching of 
Jesus was calculated to dissuade his disciples from trusting 
to or waiting for any illapse of another spirit, or any divine 
manifestation of an external nature ; that he called upon 
them to believe in the presence of the kingdom of God 
without waiting for a sign from heaven, and to make good 
their entrance into it by an energetic surrender of themselves 



234 TIIE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

to the divine will. Had he persisted, like John, in the tradi- 
tional thought that the kingdom of God could only be 
ushered in by some miraculous manifestation, the truly 
spiritual worship of God would not have been introduced by 
him, and Christianity would not have come into existence. 
It was in harmony with the counsel which he gave to his 
disciples that he himself was able to dispense with any out- 
ward communication, audible or visual, from the unseen world, 
and to regard the office for which he felt himself qualified 
to be one to which he was divinely called and commissioned. 
This qualification was his highest warrant for undertaking 
the Messianic office. On this warrant he felt himself entitled, 
nay bound, to act. He had faith in it, and upon that faith 
did he cast himself with his whole soul. The notion, which 
has been thrown out by some theologians, that he accepted 
or applied to himself the designation of Messiah only by 
way of accommodation to Jewish tradition is a feeble and 
misleading representation. Sharing, as he did, in the national 
expectation of a Messiah, his assumption of the Messianic 
name and office was the most energetic and sublime act of 
his life. It must have been a resolution to abide and to 
dare all the unknown hazards which such a claim involved. 
To shrink from any of these would, he must have felt, 
not only discredit his claim, but also undo all the effects of 
his teaching on the minds of his disciples. Indeed it is only 
by a determination to be true to an idea that we can hope to 
verify it and transform it into a certitude. And the preaching 
of Jesus consisted very much in calling upon his countrymen 
according to their measure to do as he did ; not to pray, 
" Lord, Lord," for help that would never come, but to do 
the will of God ; to seek first the kingdom of God, and to 
enter the strait gate. The man who in the strength of his 
own moral convictions could revise the Mosaic law and set 
aside various of its provisions (Mark x. 5), in spite of the 
prestige of divine authority attaching to them, might also be 
able to appropriate Messianic language to himself, solely in 
virtue of the inward warrant. And the disciples who put 
their Master's counsels into practice would thereby put his 
Messianic claim to the proof and verify it to their own satis- 
faction. 

We are aware that the views here stated differ materially 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 235 

from those generally or universally adopted, on the point 
under consideration, by theologians of the more advanced 
schools. The rule for them is to deny the Messianic con- 
sciousness of Jesus, and to regard it as mythically attributed 
to him by his disciples after the belief in his resurrection had 
taken root in their minds. But it appears to us that, by 
assigning priority to the belief in the resurrection, they leave 
that belief unaccounted for. By getting rid of the difficulty 
of accounting for the disciples' belief in the Messiahship of 
their Master they increase the difficulty of accounting for 
the origin of their belief in his resurrection. They give up 
an intermediate step or term by which the disciples might 
have risen to this latter belief. Had the disciples to the end 
only regarded him as a righteous man, they could hardly 
have risen to that belief. For the blood of many righteous 
men had been shed upon the earth without having such a 
consequence. And from our point of view, the difficulty of 
explaining the rise of the Messianic consciousness in the 
mind of Jesus, and the communication of the belief to his 
disciples, is much less than that of accounting for the belief 
of these last in his resurrection prior to their belief in his 
Messiahship. For there is no more authentic utterance of 
Jesus in the synoptists than this, that he came to fulfil (the 
law and) the prophets. As a fact this is just what he did, 
and we may well believe that he had the clearest intelligence 
that such was the case ; that he had completed what the 
prophets had left unfinished ; that he had come up to the 
truth which they had only seen afar off; that he had touched 
the goal of prophetic thought, and brought to a close that 
religious development of which the expectation of a Messiah 
was a phase or factor. He knew that by the revelation of 
his " method " of self-redemption he had brought to men 
the greatest help they could receive in the process, and that 
therefore he was greater than the prophets, who had all 
stopped short of that point. And what is this but to say, 
that he knew himself to be in a spiritual sense the Messiah 
whom men longed for, though with a vague and carnal notion 
of his nature. The one consciousness seems to us to involve 
the other. And let it be observed, that he could believe in 
his Messiahship without thinking himself to be more than 
man. He may have believed in the supernatural idea generally, 



236 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and in the inspiration of the prophets in particular, and yet 
have felt all the same, as we have already shown, that the 
attainment of the summum bonum did not depend on any 
supernatural aid ; and even that the announcement of this 
very truth was a boon to man than which even the Messiah 
could confer none greater. 

In an early part of this essay, it was stated that there 
have been two stadia in the great religious development 
which we are tracing. The first of these was the prophetic 
period which was accompanied in the highest minds by a 
sense of incompleteness ; by a sense, as in the case of Jeremiah 
(xxxi. 31), that the religious relation was not yet raised to its 
highest point, though it yet would be. And with this feeling, 
there was conjoined a prognostic in the general mind of the 
appearance of some great personage to lead men forward to 
the height of attainment. Jesus now was conscious that he 
had come to that height ; that he had arrived at the truth 
which had baffled prophetic insight ; and how could such a 
consciousness exist in his mind without kindling that other, 
which yet was not another, that he was the expected man, 
the Messiah, for whom prophets had paved the way. 

Our contention then is, that the belief of Jesus in his 
Messiahship was not part of his original consciousness, and 
did not hold possession of his mind from the first, but grew 
up slowly and gathered strength gradually. The inner witness 
of qualification, from which came the first suggestion of it, 
was confirmed by observation of the effects of his teaching 
on the disciples. He may have waived the thought of it, 
and put it aside for a time, and have entertained it cautiously, 
confining it to his own bosom, revolving it in his mind, and 
remaining in suspense until he found that a suspicion or 
presentiment of it had grown up in the minds of his followers. 
It is by this conjecture of a slow and gradual, and even 
laborious and hesitating development of this consciousness, 
that we may best explain the very singular fact that he 
deferred his entrance upon his public ministry to a compara- 
tively advanced period of his life. In a form of words, which 
seems to indicate some feeling of uncertainty as to the 
chronology, St. Luke tells us, that at the baptism, or the 
beginning of his ministry, Jesus was about thirty years of 
age. But there are data in the synoptists which make it 



- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 237 

probable that his age is understated by that Evangelist. 
During more than thirty years then, Jesus remained in absolute 
unbroken seclusion, attracting no particular attention from 
his family or his fellow-townsmen ; doing nothing all these 
years to prepare them for the assumption by him of the office 
of a teacher : of the teacher of a doctrine, which from the very 
first startled all men by its manifestly novel and revolutionary 
character. Now, it seems to us, that no explanation of this 
long inaction and obscurity, this absence of any indication 
of his future career, is so natural, as that, before he offered 
himself as an instructor, as a teacher of doctrines calculated 
to challenge and offend the cherished convictions of his age 
and country, to unhinge the minds of men, to give a new 
colour and direction to their thoughts, and to " change their 
customs," he wished to be sure of himself, sure of his doctrine, 
sure of his vocation, and sure of his plan of action. 

The step which he must have long contemplated, which he felt 
himself fated to take, because imposed on him by a necessity 
which he recognized as nothing less than the will of God, 
was yet a daring, and momentous, and perhaps a dangerous 
step, and he was in no haste to take it. Above all things, it 
was incumbent^ on him that he should be fully persuaded 
in his own mind ; that he should have a distinct perception 
of the requirements of his mission, of the goal to which the 
thoughts pointed which stirred in him, and of the means 
of success at his command ; as also, that he should be able 
to judge how far he could calculate on his own devotion, and 
on his strength of purpose to carry out the enterprise before 
him. Years of solitary communion with himself and with 
God may have been required to mature his ideal of righteous- 
ness, to settle to his own satisfaction its relation to the 
kingdom of God, and to loosen the hold which Jewish pre- 
judice and Jewish misconception might still retain over his 
feelings after they had lost it over his reason and judgment. 
Without deep and prolonged meditation and self-questioning, 
and anxious study of the thoughts of past generations, as 
recorded in the sacred writings of his people, he could not 
have succeeded in coming " into the clear " on such points, 
and in drawing a distinct line of separation between the truth 
as revealed to his mind, and the half truth which had revealed 
itself to the legislators, prophets, and wise men of old. 



238 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Among the ancients of the people, the men of old time, 
of whom Jesus spoke with but moderate, not to say scant, 
respect (Matth. v. 21, 27, etc.), were included the prophets, no 
less than the jurists and rabbins of former generations. Not 
that he undervalued the services which the prophets had 
rendered to the cause of religion ; but that he wished it to be 
understood, that he did not attribute finality to their doctrine, 
that he was not satisfied with their teaching, and that he 
undertook to complete or fulfil what they had left unfinished. 
Nothing could better express his confidence in the absolute 
superiority of his doctrine, than his repeated use of that 
formula in the Sermon on the Mount, " Ye have heard that 
it was said by (to) them of old time : but I say unto you " 
(on the contrary). This is the language of a man who knew 
himself to be in possession of a wisdom never before uttered. 
The same confidence is conspicuous in the Amen, with which 
he prefaced much of his teaching. This " verbum solenne " 
was not used by him as an imposing form of language to 
force his doctrine upon the acceptance of his hearers ; on the 
contrary, he expected it to derive its authority from the power 
of his doctrine to call forth the Amen on their part. His 
doctrine addressed itself to their inmost hearts, to that sense 
of what was good and true, which was overlaid by the selfish- 
ness and conventionality of life ; and encouraged the hidden 
and unexhumed consciousness to rise and assert itself, to 
take that place in thought and conduct which of right 
belonged to it. No doubt this is true only of his use of 
the word as a preface to his ethical dicta, and it is not 
impossible that the compilers of the Gospels may have re- 
presented him as using it unwarrantably, as, e.g., in prophetic 
announcements to which the assent of his hearers could not 
in any proper sense be an Amen. ' But, at all events, the 
formula was characteristic of his mode of discourse and, when 
he did employ it, it was as when he stretched forth his helping 
hand to the paralytic, to encourage him to exert the strength 
which might yet be latent, though spell-bound, in his limbs. 
And it is not impossible even, that the disciples' experience 
or consciousness of the helping sympathetic power over the 
spiritual life, which resided in words spoken by Jesus, may 
have suggested to their imaginations the narratives of those 
miraculous healings in the Gospels, which, in sensuous form, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 239 

served so admirably to represent the working of that 
power. 

The growth of moral certitude in the mind of Jesus, and the 
ripening of his purpose to proclaim his doctrine, was not the 
less but rather the more spontaneous, not the less but rather 
the more an evidence of his religious genius — that it was slow, 
deliberate, and laborious. Before he could reach that certitude 
and that resolution the light of prophecy failed him, and left 
him to the guidance of the inner light. He could not be 
satisfied with merely copying the ancient prophets, and occupy- 
ing anew the ground on which they had stood ; for, if for no 
other reason, it is plain to us, and how much more to him, that 
they were never able to disengage their own higher thoughts 
from the lower conceptions of morality and religion which were 
established in the popular mind and in the national institutions. 
To take but one example to illustrate this observation, let any 
one read the 58th chapter of Isaiah, where one may clearly see 
the timidity, the uncertainty, and the unsteadiness of step with 
which this greatest and most evangelical of the prophets 
advanced to the higher doctrine. In the opening of that 
chapter the prophet shows that he is distinctly aware of the 
radical defect in that form of righteousness which his country- 
men affected. He next places in contrast with it, in words which 
have all the marks of the noblest inspiration and of the deepest 
spiritual insight, the idea of a better righteousness and of a 
really spiritual service. But with what bathos does he sink in 
the two concluding verses of the chapter into the mere legal view, 
and into the gross ceremonialism of Sabbath observance — en- 
joining that as if it were an essential part of the better right- 
eousness, and of the same rank in point of obligation. It seems 
as if the eagle soul of the prophet were unable to sustain its 
flight in that rarefied atmosphere in which he is soaring, and 
had suddenly dropped to a lower region ; or, as if he had not 
the courage to trust himself to a path along which few besides 
himself were travelling. If the two concluding verses be not an 
interpolation by some priestly redactor, we must suppose that 
the prophet's heart had failed him in his solitude, or that his 
grasp of the new was weakened by his reluctance or inability 
to let go the old, and that he bowed to the necessity of a com- 
promise between the two. In proof now of the greater dis- 
tinctness with which the higher view of righteousness revealed 



240 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

itself to Jesus, we might here refer to that far-reaching and 
suggestive declaration of his — that the Son of man is Lord 
also of the Sabbath day, and that the Sabbath was made for 
man and not man for the Sabbath. Manifestly these words 
express a conscious spiritual freedom never attained by the 
evangelical prophet. They furnish an evidence that in the view 
of Jesus the obligation of all statutory duties depends on their 
ministering to the spiritual weal of man, and that the spirit of 
man himself is the judge of this. But for an illustration even 
more striking of the difference to which we refer, compare with 
the dubious vacillating spirit of the prophet the courage and 
decision with which, on a trying occasion, Jesus stood his 
ground and declined to enter into compromise with the tradi- 
tional doctrine. The embarrassing question was proposed to 
him, " Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, 
but thy disciples fast not ? " i.e. (if we may read between the 
lines and supply the underlying thought), " Supposing your 
doctrine is better than that of John and the Pharisees, and 
you advocate and plead for a higher righteousness, yet why 
not retain in combination with it the customs of the fathers ? 
What harm can there be in those pious exercises which have 
aided and sustained the religious life of Israel in the past ? " 
We are told that Jesus answered readily in that proverbial 
form which a principle assumes only when it is the result of 
frequent experience and mature reflection. " No man putteth 
a piece of a new garment upon an old .... and no man 
putteth new wine into old bottles." These words show that 
he was so persuaded of the absolute superiority of his new 
doctrine, and of its sufficiency as a guide to the better life and 
the true blessedness, that he declined to retain aught of the old 
in the same piece with it, or to consent to any compromise as 
the disciples of John and the Pharisees wished him to do, and 
as Isaiah actually set the example of doing. This rejection of 
compromise manifests, on the part of Jesus, a clearness of 
vision, a distinctness and resolvedness of purpose, which he 
could not have learned from the prophets, and which may have 
cost him years of earnest thought and self-discipline before he 
could have reached it. It may also be observed that these 
words occur in all the synoptic Gospels, and that they express 
such a vivid sense of the distinctive novelty of the doctrine of 
Jesus, as well as of the antagonism between it and the older 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 24 I 

doctrine, as to contribute with other considerations to throw 
suspicion on the genuineness of the Judaizing words put into his 
mouth by Matth. v. 18, "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or 
one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." 

From what is said of the Baptist and his disciples, we see 
that he occupied very much the same ground, morally and 
religiously, as did the ancient prophets ; the same wavering and 
hesitancy between the new and the old ; the same distrust of 
the sufficiency of the former; and it may have been the clear 
perception of this difference, to many impalpable, between him- 
self and the preacher of the desert, which induced Jesus to take 
his long deferred resolution, and to try the effect of his higher 
ideas. One thing is certain, that during the years which he 
had spent in obscurity, unsuspected and unnoticed, his thought 
had matured so far that he had arrived at his doctrine of the 
better righteousness and of the purely ideal nature of the king- 
dom of God. So equipped and furnished for his great work, 
his observation of John's teaching, of its deficiency and of its 
failure to accomplish anything lasting towards the establish- 
ment of a better rule of life, together with its want of any 
principle distinctive enough to effect the overthrow of Pharisaism, 
was felt by him as a divine call to step forth to public view, and 
to undertake the task which had proved too hard for the Baptist. 

We have thus endeavoured to show that it was the irre- 
pressible and nearly mature growth of the Messianic conscious- 
ness in the mind of Jesus which prompted him to inquire of his 
disciples, " Whom say ye that I am ? " He put this question 
not so much to bring their secret feelings to the point of 
utterance, as to remove the last vestige of doubt from his own 
mind ; and when his own thought came back to him, reflected 
from their minds, it was the last and highest confirmation 
which that thought could receive, and emboldened him openly 
to assume the Messianic role. But we proceed now to observe, 
that when the disciples perceived his approval and sanction of 
Peter's confession, the remains of doubt would thereby be re- 
moved in turn from their minds, and that a new authority over 
their faith and life would thus be communicated to his words 
and doctrine. 

We have already pointed out, incidentally, how much depended 
for the establishment of Christianity on a belief in the Messiah- 
ship of its Founder. And we may here remark by the way, 

Q 



242 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that it was of even more importance that this belief should 
arise in the minds of the disciples than that it should have 
taken possession of the mind of Jesus himself; for it is con- 
ceivable that such belief might have grown up in their minds, 
just as we have seen that other beliefs did, without having 
received any encouragement from their Master ; and that, had 
that been the case, the effect would have been none the less. 
Still, it is our conviction, for the reasons just stated, that this 
belief grew up simultaneously in the minds both of the Master 
and of the disciples, and that it was this circumstance which 
gave it a firm and conclusive hold upon the minds of both. 
Proceeding upon this view, the rise and progress of this faith 
in the first disciples manifestly form an indispensable link or 
item in the genesis of Christianity, and call for further con- 
sideration. 

It has been shown that, regarded as the Messiah, Jesus 
appeared in a very different guise from what his countrymen 
had been led to expect. He presented himself only as a 
teacher, i.e., as the last and greatest of the prophets, who had 
come to complete or fulfil their work. But there can be no 
doubt that a deep impression of his Messiahship was yet made 
by his teaching on the minds of many who were sensitive to 
its power of appeal, even though they could not but be 
conscious that his office as a teacher did not satisfy the notion 
which they had hitherto connected with the Messianic office. 
With the freshness of thought imparted by his teaching to their 
minds there was also conjoined a spirit of boundless veneration 
and confidence towards Jesus personally, and both combined to 
carry them out of themselves, and for the time to make new 
men of them. There is a likelihood, moreover, that the exalted 
and enthusiastic feeling thus produced was much more powerful 
than can be gathered from the remarkably sober, unimpassioned, 
and objective narrative of the synoptic Gospels. It is conceiv- 
able that at a subsequent stage of their experience, when their 
appreciation of the character of Jesus was greatly heightened, 
the personal companions of Jesus may have upbraided them- 
selves for obtuseness of feeling and of understanding, in not 
having more clearly discerned the majesty and greatness of 
their Master while he was still with them ; and that this 
feeling of self-reproach may have coloured their reminiscences 
of that wonderful time — those days of the Son of man, which 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 243 

they may have often wished to see again (Luke xvii. 22), and 
may have had the effect of creating and disseminating among 
them an exaggerated view of their slowness of apprehension. 
The Gospels leave the general impression, that while the 
disciples, during their intercourse with Jesus, contracted a 
strong and genuine attachment to him, they had not been able, 
even while bowing implicitly to his authority, to enter much 
into the understanding of his doctrine, and had imbibed com- 
paratively little of his spirit ; and that they learned to love and 
venerate him for qualities and conduct which they could not 
imitate. But in judging how far we may, on this head, rely on 
the representation of the Gospels, we must, as has just been 
hinted, take into account the natural tendency on the part of 
the disciples, after they had risen to a transcendent view of his 
life and character, to disparage their own previous insight. The 
operation of such a tendency would be, to put its mark on the 
tradition and to co-operate with other causes in impairing the 
strictly historical character of the records. 

That the disciples, in the time of their familiar intercourse 
with him, did not adequately recognize the unique grandeur of 
their Master, nor sufficiently enter into sympathy with his plans 
and feelings, is likely enough. The greatness and significance 
of a phenomenon do not always impress us most powerfully 
when it is transacting itself before us, or passing under our 
eyes. But for all that there are various indications that the 
impression made upon them by his personality was profound. 
A proof of this may be seen in the fact, that so many men and 
women left their homes and their occupations to listen to his 
words and minister to his wants. The feeling of such persons 
towards him was truly expressed by the words which the fourth 
Evangelist puts into their mouths, " To whom shall we go (but 
unto thee) : thou alone hast the words of eternal life." The 
great majority of those who were attracted by his fame as a 
teacher and miracle-worker might be drawn to him out of mere 
curiosity, or passing wonder and emotion ; but there was an 
inner and smaller circle, represented by the twelve, but not 
limited to them, whose confidence, veneration, and attachment, 
he had completely won, because they felt in their inmost hearts 
that his words were the words of eternal truth and soberness. 

Another indication of the same thing may be seen in his 
occasional exercise of a power of moral therapeutic. In 



244 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

another connection the opinion has been expressed by us 
that his works of healing and exorcism were the effect and 
consequence of that faith and confidence which the subjects 
of them reposed in him. The most probable explanation that 
can be given of these apparent miracles is that they were, at 
the first, wrought by him unintentionally and unawares. In 
the commotion or mental tumult caused by the approach and 
presence of one whom they regarded with enthusiastic vene- 
ration, or (as has been strikingly and sensuously expressed in 
regard to a widely different occasion) in " that mysterious 
shiver, which always runs through one on the approach of 
divine things or great men," some forgot their pains, or threw 
off permanently, or for a time at least, their sense of impotence 
and paralysis, or their feeling of subjection to evil influence ; 
and when, by repetition of such cases, the fame and rumour of 
his miraculous powers were spread abroad, it needed but the 
touch of his hand, the look of his eye, his voice of command, 
the rustle of his garment, or the passing of his shadow, to make 
men feel the power return to their limbs : every fresh instance 
of the kind would heighten the healing power of the imagination 
thus set to work. Now, we say that the energy of the faith, 
which was the efficient instrument of these healing acts, was 
one more proof of the depth of the impression which Jesus had 
made on men's minds even before the last scenes of his life. 

But nothing could more strongly indicate the depth of this 
impression than the fact that a persuasion of his being the 
promised Messiah grew up silently, without prompting, and 
without acknowledgment in the mind of Peter and his com- 
panions. Many things in succession contributed to lead up 
to this impression upon the few who took to him. His 
doctrine appealed powerfully to their spiritual nature, and 
attracted them to his person, and that attraction grew more 
magnetic and commanding when it was seen that, in his own 
life and conduct, he so perfectly illustrated his doctrine, en- 
acting it, so to speak, and making it to live before them, 
and clothing it, as it were, with flesh and blood, so that it 
was no more a mere doctrine to be believed, but a person 
whom they could love and sympathize with, an object which 
appealed at once to their intellect, their feeling, and their 
imagination, and thus laid deep hold of their whole nature. 
Yet further, it has to be observed that the physical or physi- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 245 

ological effects, which seemed to accompany his footsteps, 
his miracles of healing and exorcism, which were really, as 
just said, the effects of the faith in him which had been pre- 
viously awakened, were regarded by all spectators as the 
puttings forth of a miraculous power on his part ; and this 
belief, it will be allowed, would also form a factor in the 
cumulative evidence to their minds that he was the divine 
messenger whose coming was at that time the fondest dream 
of the nation. What other explanation indeed could be given 
of the powers physical and spiritual which he seemed to ex- 
ercise, than that he was the promised Messiah. This was a 
suggestion that must have been ever present to their minds, 
only kept from breaking forth into confession and loud acclaim 
by the fact that Jesus himself remained silent. All that was 
needed to convert that secretly cherished and growing per- 
suasion into a faith for which men might either live or die, 
was a word of encouragement from him. And this word 
was spoken at the critical moment, when Peter for the first 
time, and as spokesman for his fellow-disciples, openly avowed 
his belief that Jesus was the Messiah. " Flesh and blood," 
said Jesus, " hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father, 
which is in heaven." To find that Jesus thus sanctioned 
that faith in himself as the anointed messenger of God, which 
had been growing up independently and undemonstratively in 
them, was a consideration to which their reverent and un- 
questioning confidence in his truthfulness, sobriety, and hum- 
ility could not but lend decisive weight. The suspicion either 
of imposture or delusion in connection with one whose whole 
life and conduct afforded a complete guarantee for the honesty 
and moderation of his judgment, could not possibly enter their 
minds. By the time of the journey to Caesarea Philippi they 
had learned to trust him so implicitly that they believed his 
word even when he bore witness to himself. They might, but 
they felt that he could not be mistaken, and that the claim 
made by him was no boastful, insincere, or unwarranted claim, 
but one which he could not disavow nor put away from him 
without being untrue to himself and to his mission, a view 
of his position, we may observe, the same as that which St. 
Paul afterwards took of his own when he said, " Woe is me 
if I preach not the gospel." 

According to the view now given, there was a certain vc- 



246 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

ciprocity or interaction between the mind of Jesus and that 
of his disciples, unenlightened and dependent upon him as 
they were. Both he and they, as we imagine, had been 
gradually, silently, and simultaneously drawing near to the 
conclusion that he was none other than the promised Messiah, 
notwithstanding some appearances to the contrary, such as the 
absence of many expected signs and indications, and the 
hostility and unbelief of the accredited teachers of the nation; 
and this conclusion became the firm conviction both of master 
and disciple when the discovery was made by them that it was 
shared in by both alike. According to the orthodox-dogmatic 
view, which is foreshadowed or represented in the fourth Gospel, 
there could have been no such mutual or reciprocal action be- 
tween Jesus and his disciples, no development of thought in his 
mind, and, by consequence, hardly any such in the minds of his 
disciples, who are therefore represented in that Gospel as being 
taught by the Baptist and by Jesus himself from the very first 
to regard him as the Lamb of God and the Son of God. Such 
transitive action as there might be must, in that case, have 
radiated all from his side, while they were but the passive, un- 
responsive, unreciprocating recipients of it. Such a view, how- 
ever, does not answer to the relation which we consider to have 
existed between him and them. We may well conceive that 
he may have owed little to them, but that little may yet have 
been a not unessential factor in his spiritual development. 
The reflection of his own light from their minds back upon 
himself was not without effect upon him, as was illustrated 
immediately after the incident, or eclaircissement at Caesarea 
Philippi. The fact there ascertained by him that his teaching 
and life had impressed the minds of his disciples with the con- 
viction of his Messiahship, besides that it put a complete end 
to his state of suspense, was an indication to him that a crisis 
or turning point had arrived in his life-work ; that his doctrine 
had made a deep impression on his Galilean followers ; that a 
change in his mode and field of action was now necessary ; 
that he could no longer confine himself to a private or circum- 
scribed and secluded sphere, nor remain a dweller in a remote 
province, or a wanderer in outlying corners of the land. This 
was a discovery which guided him towards his destiny, and 
formed, we may say, a necessary step in the development of 
Christianity. 



CHAPTER X. 

HIS JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM AND HIS DEATH THERE. 

At this point of time, therefore, he turned his face towards 
Jerusalem, and did not pause until he arrived, though not by 
the direct route, in that city, where, or in whose immediate 
neighbourhood, he spent the last days of his life. This change 
of venue was due, not as some have supposed, to the feeling 
that his work in Galilee had been a failure, but rather to the 
perception that it had succeeded so far but could not be carried 
further, or at least completed, except at the capital, which was 
at once the holy city of the land, and the headquarters of the 
system which he wished to overthrow. The orthodox ex- 
planation is, that he went thither to complete his work by his 
death ; the explanation of the mediating school of theology is, 
that in the confidence of his Messiahship he went to Jerusalem 
in the expectation of some great manifestation there, by which 
his cause would be signally advanced, and the kingdom of 
God visibly set up. Of these two explanations the former has 
much more the air of truth than the latter. There is no 
evidence whatever in support of the latter explanation, no 
evidence that he contemplated or sought to precipitate a 
sudden extension on a national scale of the better form of 
society, or that he looked for any sudden and brilliant mani- 
festation of divine power in his favour. There cannot be a 
doubt that he did indeed contemplate, as the ultimate natural 
and possible result of his teaching, a renovated form of society, 
whose bond of union would be an affinity of spirit in its in- 
dividual members. But his immediate, as opposed to his 
ultimate, aim, was to " lay his mind " upon a limited circle 
which, by the virtue of its new life, would gradually extend 



248 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and enlarge itself till it should fill the world and embrace 
humanity. His unique distinction as a teacher of religion 
consisted in his having spiritualized the historical idea of the 
kingdom of God, in having removed from it every trace of 
sensuousness, and in having made a clear separation between 
the things of God and the things of Csesar. We, therefore, 
reject the supposition that he at any time expected the sudden 
and visible establishment of the kingdom of which he spoke. 
Such an expectation would have been at variance with the 
slow growth and gradual development which his parables of 
the mustard seed and the leaven ascribe to the kingdom, and 
at variance also with the general doctrine of its inwardness and 
ideal nature. 

The true and natural and only remaining explanation of 
his journey to Jerusalem is that it was laid upon him as a 
necessity — the same necessity as is felt by men in situations 
corresponding to that in which he was placed — the necessity 
of advancing along a path on which they have entered, and 
of making progress in prosecuting the work they have begun. 
Having gained the ear and impressed the mind of Galilee, 
he must have felt that nothing more could be done by 
remaining there ; the seed which he had sown there must be 
left to germinate. It was necessary that he should transfer 
the scene of his labours to Judea, and to Jerusalem, the civil 
and religious capital of the country, and to present his doctrine 
and his claims to the heads and elders of the nation in whom 
the established religion had its chief representatives. He had 
no alternative but to come forth from his comparative obscurity 
and show himself openly to the world. This was a necessity 
of the situation which by imaginative insight, — that creative 
faculty by which the dramatist passes beyond the limits of 
experience, and thinks himself into untried conditions, — the 
fourth Evangelist (vii. 3, 4) was able to indicate — " His 
brethren, therefore, said unto him, Depart hence, and go into 
Judea, that thy disciples also may see the works that thou 
doest. For there is no man that doeth anything in secret, 
and he himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou do 
these things, shew thyself to the world." • The Messianic 
programme required that Jesus should now put his reputation 
to the proof, and justify his pretensions by confronting the 
priests and rulers in their stronghold in the capital. Nothing 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 249 

further could be done by the desultory and indecisive skirmish- 
ing which he had conducted against them hitherto. Were he 
to allow it to be thought that he had now done all he could do, 
all he meant to do, in the way of fulfilling his ministry and 
authenticating his Messiahship, the spell which had been cast 
around his person would be broken, the tide would begin to 
turn in favour of the constituted teachers and of the established 
order which had been assailed by him. An advance upon 
Jerusalem was so obviously imposed upon him by the circum- 
stances, that to shrink from it in reality would have been to 
decline the post of danger, to avoid the rising storm, to confess 
himself unequal to the cherished project of his life, and to 
abandon the great enterprise which he had undertaken of 
laying the foundation of the spiritual kingdom of God, t.e. s as 
already explained of creating a new current in the world's 
history, and lifting the life of the nation up to a higher 
level. Or had he only seemed to hold back it would be 
attributed by his disciples to lack of courage and to distrust 
of himself and his doctrine. Were that idea to gain ground 
he could no longer hope to work upon the people and to 
retain his hold of their minds. To linger and tarry upon 
ground already traversed would be to pause in his work, to 
give proof of indecision, or of hesitation, which would cost 
him his credit with the people and go far to undo the effect 
of all he had hitherto accomplished. The sympathy of the 
disciples would fall away, and the stream of the new life 
which had begun to flow would be cut off and dried up. 
Therefore, knowing full well the double danger — the danger 
to himself if he advanced to Jerusalem and the still greater 
danger to the disciples if he held back- — he chose the former, 
and went up, not knowing the issue, but resolved on prosecut- 
ing his work by teaching in the streets and temple of the 
city, and making his doctrine more widely and publicly 
known. 

The appearance of Jesus in the streets of Jerusalem could 
not but be felt by the priests and Pharisees to be a defiance 
and a challenge, and by them his death was determined on 
now, if not before. Their motives, indeed, for this determina- 
tion have been otherwise explained. The words attributed 
to Caiaphas by the fourth Evangelist, "It is expedient for us 
that one man should die for the people, and that the whole 



250 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

nation perish not" (John xi. 50), suggest another explana- 
tion, viz., the dread lest the pretensions of Jesus to be the 
Messiah should, by the stir it was calculated to create among 
the people, bring them into collision with the Romans. St. 
Luke also says that the mob arraigned him before Pilate for 
entertaining treasonable designs. But there is no indication 
whatever that the dread of being compromised by his doings 
was well founded, and the probability is that this dread, if 
expressed, was only a pretext. The Roman governor was to 
all appearance disposed to regard Jesus as a harmless 
enthusiast, a species of pretender, of which, like the Romans 
generally, he was perfectly tolerant. He declared publicly 
and emphatically that he could find no fault in Jesus, and 
no occasion for the secular power to proceed against him. 
The likelihood therefore is that the priests and rulers only 
gave out, and wished it to be believed, that they had a fear 
of this kind ; it was only the ostensible motive for their 
action, designed to cover their real motive, which was to 
defend their own religious prestige, or, let us say, their 
hierocratic authority. This was respected by the Romans, 
but was assailed by Jesus, who had entered on a life and 
death struggle with them, which could be ended only by 
removing him out of the way. The offence which Jesus 
gave at this time to the priests and scribes reached its climax 
(according to the synoptists) when he drove the money 
changers and the sellers of doves from the temple. It has 
been well remarked by Pfleiderer that this incident had for 
the rise of Christianity the same significance as had the 
act of Luther, in nailing his Theses to the door of the 
Church at Wittenberg, for the rise of Protestantism. It 
was by arrangement, doubtful from the religious point of 
view, of the authorities, that the dealers were admitted to the 
temple, and the action of Jesus in expelling them could 
not but be regarded by the former as an insult to themselves 
which could only be wiped out by his blood. The different 
version which the fourth Evangelist gives of the immediate 
causes which led to the crucifixion will have to engage our 
attention when we come to the consideration of his Gospel. 

His death was now resolved on, and he, probably anticipat- 
ing the worst, went voluntarily and heroically into the jaws 
of death, knowing that for him there was no retreat and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 25 I 

no escape except by the abandonment of his great enterprise. 
Whether he had ever had the hope of a different issue for 
himself even from the commencement of his ministry is very 
doubtful. He had taken ample time, as we have seen, to 
survey the situation, to count the cost, and to estimate the 
forces of inertia and of evil which were ranged against him. 
He had also from the first the fate of the Baptist before his 
eye, and he knew that his own project was much more radical 
and revolutionary in a religious sense, and therefore more 
calculated to excite antipathy, than the Baptist's had been. 
At any rate it is plain that the hope of a safe issue, if it 
was ever entertained by him, was faint indeed from the time 
of his return from Caesarea Philippi. Brought up as he had 
been in the belief that God had wrought great deliverances 
for Israel and for many of His servants in ages past, he 
might possibly have some faint hope that God would interfere 
at the last moment in his behalf. The words with which, 
according to St. Matthew, he expired on the cross, seem to 
indicate the abandonment of such a hope. But whether 
these and other words on that occasion are or are not 
authentic, it is evident that the persistent non-intervention on 
the part of heaven must have disposed him to contemplate 
the probable triumph of his enemies and a cruel death for 
himself. His long delay in assuming the teacher's office may 
also have been due to his not being able to discern the 
presence of conditions necessary for a successful prosecution 
of his purpose ; and it is possible that he may have finally 
undertaken it only when at last the disclosure was made to 
his ruminating mind that true success might spring out of 
apparent defeat ; that in suffering patiently the last extremities 
of pain and ignominy he might give such an illustration of 
his doctrine and of his devotion to the cause of God as 
might invest his death with a triumphant power over men's 
minds. The fourth Evangelist credits him with this thought 
in that famous passage, " I, when I am lifted up, will draw 
all men unto me." But if such words, or words of like 
significance, were ever spoken by Jesus, if he ever anticipated 
such an effect from his death, it certainly argued a most 
complete knowledge of the human heart and its springs of 
action : such a knowledge as could hardly have been gained 
by experience. For the power of suffering to stir the deeper 



252 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and mightier sympathies of the human heart could scarcely 
be said to have been yet exemplified, and was something 
quite novel in the history of man. But this power, though 
unknown to that age, was a fact which experience rendered 
familiar to the early Church, so that the Evangelist himself 
may have drawn upon that experience to illustrate the super- 
human foreknowledge of Jesus ; by representing the strange 
effect of his death as having been designed or at least fore- 
seen by him. We are inclined therefore to regard the mental 
attitude of Jesus on the way to Jerusalem as one of suspense 
and of uncertainty as to the issue. We cannot tell, indeed, 
how far he might be carried or what deductions he might 
draw from his belief in his Messiahship. He might be led, 
as just said, to expect that God would interfere in his behalf 
at the last moment, if not before. But his resolution was 
taken, like that of the three youths spoken of in the book of 
Daniel — a book which he had doubtless made his deep study 
— that, even if God did not deliver, he would yet, be the 
issue what it might, be faithful to his mission. 

The result was what Jesus apprehended, and was not unpre- 
pared for. His enemies prevailed. The spiritual weapons 
which he wielded told with no effect upon insensible hearts, 
and were blunted against weapons which were carnal. His 
enemies replied to all his appeals by nailing him to the cross, 
and putting him to death in its cruellest and most ignominious 
form ; and his spirit, which had striven in vain with human 
prejudice and perversity, winged its flight to the presence of 
the Eternal. In this last proof which he gave of the purity of 
his idealism, in the patience, calm fortitude, and unshaken 
resolution with which, when left without a sign from heaven, 
and without sympathy from man, he encountered, without 
flinching, his cruel fate, the grandeur of his character, and his 
fidelity to the principles which he inculcated, were more con- 
spicuously manifested than in all his life besides. And such, 
doubtless, would have been the immediate impression made 
upon the minds of his disciples by the closing scenes, had not 
fear for their personal safety, and grief at the calamity which 
had befallen their Master, as well as the demolition of all the 
hopes they had built upon him, deprived them, for the time 
being, of the ability to weigh or to feel the force of such con- 
siderations. 







THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 253 

It was when Jesus had the near prospect of death before 
him that he is reported by the Evangelists to have said that he 
had come to give his life a ransom for many, and to shed his 
blood for the remission of sins. Reasons have already been 
given for the conjecture that such words, in their plain, dog- 
matic sense, could not have been uttered by him ; but we may 
take this opportunity for saying that there is an undogmatic 
sense in which some such words may have been used by him. 
They may have been intended by him to express, without 
circumlocution, the service which he hoped to perform to his 
disciples, viz., not that of redeeming them, but that of stirring 
them up to redeem or emancipate themselves from the power 
of evil. He may have hoped that the manifestation in his 
death of self-denying love, and of devotion to the cause of 
righteousness, which brought with it the consciousness of divine 
forgiveness, the pacification of their higher nature, would infect 
them with the same spirit, and rouse their moral energies to 
embark in the conflict with evil ; and with this in view, he 
might speak of himself figuratively, or elliptically, as if he 
were actually to pay the price of their redemption — the more 
especially as he may have anticipated that he would fall as a 
victim or bloody sacrifice to the task which he had undertaken. 
He knew that that saying of his, " He that loseth his life shall 
save it," was true of himself as well as of others. Indeed, he knew 
it to be true of others because he had found it to be true of 
himself. But it was of the very nature of such self-sacrifice to 
look beyond self, so as to include others in the field of one's 
vision ; or it was to lose sight of self, so as to find it again in 
the life of others. And by the time at which Jesus had now 
arrived, the duty of saving his own life had become as nothing — 
had become merged and lost sight of — in the consuming ardour 
with which he addressed himself to the duty which he owed to 
the " many " — the duty of drawing them into sympathy with 
himself by going on to the bitter end, and by obedience unto 
death. To his prophetic, penetrating eye, it may have been 
revealed that his death, as the culmination of his life, might 
have the same effect ultimately on the life and conscience of 
his disciples as if it had been accepted by God as a ransom 
and atonement, according to the idea currently connected with 
these terms by the Jewish people ; and we can partially under- 
stand how, in a moment of grave enthusiasm, such words may 



254 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

have fallen from him. And if it were so ; — if the idea of 
atonement was thus used by Jesus, figuratively or popularly, to 
foreshadow the effects of his death, the disciples could hardly 
fail afterwards to misunderstand his words, and to take them 
as a warrant for the dogma, according to which his sufferings 
were in a literal sense the price and penalty paid to God for 
human redemption, while his expectation was that his death 
would operate on the moral and rational nature of many in 
such a way as to draw them by sympathy with him into a 
like spirit of devotion, and so to deliver them from the burden 
of guilt and the tyranny of sin. The disciples, on the other 
hand, would naturally give to the process a mysterious and 
supernatural character by overlooking the intermediate link, 
and giving solitary prominence to the ultimate effect. A 
mystical or magical character would thus be imported into the 
religious process which took its start from his death, just as it 
may be imported into any process by the omission of a link in 
the chain of causation. If, then, we accept of the two appar- 
ently exceptional sayings of Jesus as genuine, we should have 
to regard them, not as literally, but as figuratively meant — not 
as scientifically accurate, but, in the language of Mr. Arnold, 
as popular and literary expressions thrown out at a great sub- 
ject, which the hearers could hardly understand, or as language 
called forth by the highly-wrought state of feeling with which 
Jesus advanced to his impending death, and by his intense 
realization of the great results which he expected to flow 
from it. 

Probably the disciples were never able to realize the full 
grandeur of the spectacle which he presented in submitting to 
death. Even we can realize it only by dismissing the idea of 
the supernatural from all connection with it. The probability 
in that case is, that with the prospect before him of an early 
and violent termination of his lifework, he would be painfully 
sensible that he had failed of its accomplishment ; that he had 
made no permanent impression on the minds of his disciples ; 
and that his apparent defeat and discomfiture was not only 
apparent but real. But this, if it were the case, would only 
have the effect of exalting our idea of the nobility and lofty 
idealism of his character. " To die in vain," it has been well 
said, is " the noblest death." And we may remember those 
striking words of St. Paul, " For a good man some would even 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 255 

dare to die ; but God commencleth his love toward us, in that, 
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." By reason- 
ing of an analogous kind, we should say that if Jesus could 
have anticipated with confidence the effect which his death 
actually has exerted upon succeeding generations, it would 
render the heroism of it more intelligible, z>., more common- 
place, and more within the compass of ordinary humanity. 
The hope of doing some great thing, of effecting some large 
benefit for mankind, is what has nerved numberless individuals 
to acts of heroic self-devotion ; but if the suspicion overtook 
Jesus, that he had failed of his purpose, that his premature 
death would be the frustration of all his work, obliterating all 
traces of it in the world, and leaving his disciples none the 
better for it ; and if yet he remained true to the call of duty, 
and hearkened simply to the voice of conscience, this does not 
diminish the lustre of his character — does not show him to 
be less, but rather to be more than his disciples took him for. 
Be this as it may, we may be sure that, by the time of his 
journey towards Jerusalem, Jesus felt that he had now taught 
all that he could teach by word of mouth, that he could do 
nothing more for his disciples in the way of mere verbal utter- 
ance, and that even what they had learned would be lost upon 
them, the impression of it effaced, unless he went further, and 
proceeded to fix it upon their minds, by showing that he was 
ready to die for it. And this final step he took as an act, at 
once of fidelity to the higher truth which he taught, and of 
supreme love for his disciples — two objects which for him were 
one and indivisible. And however dark the situation, however 
deep the gloom which had gathered round him, he may even 
have hoped, as Socrates is said to have done, that his disciples 
after his death would carry on the work he had begun. 

Our steps here are necessarily halting and uncertain. For 
we do not wish to affect a confidence which we do not feel, 
and we trust that the reader will keep this in view. Various 
alternatives present themselves to our minds, none of which 
can be definitely dismissed, corresponding, it may be, to the 
feelings of doubt and suspense which, at this crisis, agitated 
the mind of Jesus, without, however, shaking his resolve to 
be true to his inward vocation. Were it not for that belief 
in his own Messiahship which we attribute to him, we should 
deem it doubtful whether Jesus ever anticipated the posthumous 



256 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

triumph of his doctrine and his cause. His original aim was 
probably a modest one, and his main concern may have been 
for his " neighbours " and his immediate followers, to instruct 
them in the way to the better life. But, on the other hand, 
that belief of his, founded, as we have seen, on the transcendent 
significance of his doctrine and on its powerful effect upon his 
disciples, may probably have enlarged his horizon and extended 
his view, even to those who were not of that fold nor of that 
generation. It is pretty plain, not only that the statutory 
requirements of the Jewish law had no place in the way of life 
which he pointed out, but also that he was fully aware of this 
fact ; and that, therefore, he may have seen that his doctrine 
was the truth for all people, Gentiles as well as Jews. Indeed, 
he could not but be aware that the fundamental and com- 
manding principle of his doctrine placed the individual in a 
personal relation to God, which was one and the same for 
every man, and made all extraneous, conventional, and sectional 
distinctions of no account. He that enters into the spirit of 
this doctrine will hold loosely to any of the sects or parties 
into which Christendom is divided ; but he will attach himself 
to all in whom he recognizes the like spirit. 



_ 



CHAPTER XI. 



THE CHRISTOPHANIES. 



WHATEVER the Master's state of mind or outlook, certainly 
the disciples were wholly unprepared for the catastrophe. 
They either could not or would not understand the warnings 
respecting his impending fate, which he had given them ever 
since the day at Csesarea Philippi. They would know nothing, 
any more than would the Jewish rulers and rabble, of a suffering 
Messiah. For even if, as is now affirmed, the idea of a suffering 
Messiah was not wholly strange to Jewish thought, yet we can 
easily understand how the reality, when presented in the guise 
of poverty and mean estate, might be too much for faith to 
embrace. The disciples seem persistently to have put aside 
from them the possibility of any but a triumphant issue to the 
life and labours of their great leader. The Baptist, as we have 
seen, doubted the Messiahship of Jesus, because no mighty 
wonders, no great event of national importance, had accom- 
panied his ministry ; but the disciples, on the other hand, 
confident of his Messiahship, persisted in the belief that some 
such event, some visible and striking manifestation of his 
divine mission, would yet come in due time. In fact, this 
expectation was an integral element, an unconscious stipulation 
of their faith in him, and no sign of coming disaster could 
shake their confidence. Almost at the very last they disputed 
among themselves which of them should be greatest in the 
kingdom of heaven, the establishment of which they looked 
upon as an imminent and all but accomplished fact. The 
mother of Zebedee's children in perfect simplicity, and with 
motherly naivete, asked that her two sons should have the 
places of honour assigned to them on the right and left of 

R 



258 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

their Master. It was with the confidence inspired by such 
expectations that the disciples accompanied him to Jerusalem. 

The disappointment, therefore, caused to the disciples by the 
catastrophe, which involved, for the moment, the ruin of all 
their hopes, was all the more acute and overwhelming because 
of its sudden and total unexpectedness. It was what they had 
never looked for, never taken into calculation, and a feeling of 
stupor and amazement mingled with their feeling of grief and 
of blank despair. It came like a clap of thunder in a serene 
sky, and, for the time, their dejection was complete, leaving 
them, a few, defenceless in the midst of mocking and hostile 
multitudes, perfectly spiritless, and without a plan of any kind 
for future guidance. No dream was ever more completely 
dissipated, no waking to reality was ever more painful, no 
fabric of a fond imagination was ever, to all appearance, 
more suddenly and totally laid prostrate, past all hope of 
restoration. 

If we place before us all the circumstances of the case, the 
painful situation into which the disciples were thrown by the 
unexpected, violent, and ignominious removal of one in whom, 
as in a being of higher nature, they had learned to place the 
most absolute reliance, and had found an object of unbounded 
veneration ; by intercourse with whom they had felt themselves 
brought into close proximity, as it were, with the unseen world, 
and elevated to a level of the spiritual life which was new to 
their experience : — it cannot but appear extraordinary in the 
highest degree that, without self-reliance, without the support of 
numbers, and without any quality or promise of greatness, they 
should yet have rallied from that profound fall, that shipwreck 
of cherished hopes, and have reunited after their dispersion, to 
form the nucleus of a society for which there was neither model 
nor programme ; which yet, gradually and steadily, in the midst 
of a hostile world, constituted itself, took shape and organiza- 
tion, and changed the face of human affairs. But so it was. 
For, there is nothing more certain in the history of man than 
that the state of panic and prostration into which they were 
thrown was of short duration ; that the small, and apparently 
forlorn band, which had lost its head and centre, speedily 
regained its courage, and, in the absence of all the ordinary 
motives of human exertion, began, with imposing energy and 
confidence, and with a freshness of enthusiasm which astonished 



_ 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIC ION. 259 

the multitude and made head against all opposition, to proclaim 
its belief in the Messiahship of the crucified one, to disseminate 
its new-born faith, and to add rapidly to the number of its 
adherents. 

The great question has here to be considered, how this 
change of attitude, this revolution of feeling, was brought 
about ; what forces were in operation to accomplish it ? Could 
we trust implicitly to the evangelical narratives of this remark- 
able and unique phenomenon, we should have to believe that 
the period of depression and despondency on the part of the 
solitary band of disciples lasted for little more than a single 
day, and that they were roused from their state of panic and 
consternation by the reappearance in the midst of them of 
their crucified Master ; that their feelings of dismay and despair 
gave place to a feeling of more than their former confidence 
and hopefulness, in consequence of the bodily manifestation to 
their senses of their risen Lord. Such an experience, had it 
actually befallen them, would, we readily admit, be enough to 
account for all the effects ascribed to it : for their emancipation 
from their feelings of shame, disappointment, grief, and de- 
spondency ; for the energy with which they defied the hostility 
of their countrymen, and addressed themselves to the herculean 
task of converting the world, and leavening it with the faiths 
and principles with which Jesus had imbued them ; and finally, 
it would account for the universal prevalence in the early Church 
of faith in the fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and for 
the rapid propagation of the Christian religion. We do not 
question that such a cause was adequate to the production of 
all these great effects. To the early Church, indeed, it seemed 
to be such an adequate explanation, that it was unhesitatingly 
accepted as a fact, which was confirmed by every fresh triumph 
of the gospel. Yet, while making this admission, we can hardly 
resist the feeling that the idea of the bodily resurrection of 
Jesus is more like a suggestion of human phantasy to account 
for that great revolution in the spiritual life than like a divine 
expedient to produce it. And to this, the usual (orthodox) 
explanation of the undeniable facts, which have a place and a 
significance in universal history, there are various objections of 
a more tangible kind, severally and cumulatively decisive. Into 
these objections we do not enter fully, but only so far as seems 
necessary for our general purpose. 



260 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

First, then, the undeniable circumstance that this manifesta- 
tion, whatever it was, was made not to all the people, but to a 
select few (Acts x. 40, 41) ; confined to brethren (1 Cor. xv. 6) 
and Galilaeans (Acts ii. 7), i.e., to those who already believed, or 
were disposed to believe, seems to show, at the outset, notwith- 
standing all that has been said to the contrary, that the pheno- 
menon was not objective but subjective, a creation of faith, of 
imaginative expectancy, or of sympathetic longing. Just as we 
have already accounted for the works of healing and exorcism 
ascribed to Jesus, not by the supposition of a power or virtue 
proceeding from him, but by that of a hidden rapport between 
the spiritual and bodily state of the subjects called into activity 
by awe and veneration for the person of Jesus, so we shall 
account for these apparent manifestations (Christophanies, as 
they have been called) by the after-effect or revival, after the 
rude shock which it had received from the catastrophe of the 
crucifixion, of that profound impression made by the personality 
and teaching of Jesus on the minds of his followers. 

Secondly, the three narratives (for we leave the fourth out of 
account) of these manifestations are so utterly inconsistent and 
discrepant as to details, as not merely, as orthodox theologians 
would have us believe, to serve an apologetic purpose by doing 
away % with the suspicion of collusion on the part of the Evan- 
gelists, but also, over and above that, to seriously shake our 
belief of there having been any palpable and external fact to 
account for their origin. That, whatever conclusion may be 
arrived at as to the general fact of the resurrection, the detailed 
account of the relative circumstances is very unreliable, may be 
inferred from a single observation which can scarcely be dis- 
puted, viz., that Galilee, and not Jerusalem and its neighbour- 
hood, was the scene of the experiences which gave rise to the 
tradition, so that we may unhesitatingly put aside whatever is 
reported in this reference to have occurred in the neighbourhood 
of Jerusalem.^ There are various indications in the Gospels, 

* The chief proof of what is here stated is drawn from St. Mark's Gospel. 
This Gospel is now generally admitted to be the earliest, as it is the briefest 
of the series ; and there is strong evidence, both external and internal, that 
in its original form it ended with the 8th verse of the 16th chapter. The 
twelve following verses were unknown to the earliest of the Greek fathers, 
and are wanting in the best manuscripts. Obviously, too, they are not the 
natural sequel to what goes before. The Christophanies in Jerusalem or its 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 26 I 

survivals of the earliest tradition, lingering memories of the 
actual facts, which, disregarded or overlaid by subsequent 
accretions, point to this general conclusion ; and reasons can 
easily be imagined, which may have weighed with the mythical 
fancy, to make the capital and the vicinity of the sepulchre, 
instead of outlying Galilee, the scene of the occurrences. 
Another fact, less frequently adverted to, which points in the 
same direction, is the omission or suppression in the synoptists 
of all direct reference in narrative form to St. Peter's vision of 
the risen Christ, which St. Paul (1 Cor. xv.) has placed in the 
foreground as having the precedence among the Christophanies. 
This observation has made a deep impression, as well it might, 
upon the calmly judicial mind of Weizsacker, the distinguished 
critic, who, with a complete knowledge of all that has been 
urged upon the apologetic side, has recently reviewed the 
evidence for the resurrection. He regards the omission as a 
proof that the legendary element has quite got the better of 
the historical element in the Gospel narratives, and explains it 
by the conjecture that the actual experience of St. Peter, on 
which so much depended, was not of such a nature as to 
satisfy the craving of the Church for a palpable, z>., objective 
manifestation. 

To harmonize the several narratives, and to reduce all the 
details into one consecutive and consistent whole, is indeed im- 
possible. It is a task which can be achieved to the satisfaction 
even of the most credulous and illogical only by an expendi- 
ture of ingenuity which is sufficient, when duly considered, to 
create suspicion, and by such unstinted use of hypothesis and 
conjecture, as is never resorted to except for the establishment 
of a foregone conclusion. It may be said, indeed, that this is a 
remark which applies to our own discussion of the subject. 
But there is this great difference, that our resort to conjecture 

neighbourhood which they narrate render nugatory the injunction given to 
the disciples in verse 7, to go to Galilee to see the risen Jesus. The natural 
sequel, which is, therefore, left to be inferred, would be, that the disciples 
obeyed the injunction and hastened to Galilee to see Jesus. Instead of 
which they are represented as lingering in Jerusalem, and seeing Jesus with- 
out proceeding to Galilee. The Christophanies with which they are thus 
favoured are manifestly a synopsis of those which are narrated by the other 
three Gospels ; adopted, that is to say, into the tradition at a time subsequent 
to the composition of St. Mark's Gospel, to which it was appended by another 
hand. 



262 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

is justified, or rather rendered imperative, by the critical neces- 
sity of getting rid of the supernatural element, whereas con- 
jecture is resorted to by apologists to vindicate the presence in 
gospel history of that element against which the scientific con- 
science has risen, and is still rising more and more in rebellion. 
If it be true, as has been asserted, that there is no other 
event of ancient history so well authenticated as the fact of 
the resurrection, or, that " there is a greater weight of historical 
evidence for that event than there is for almost any other 
received historical fact," it may also be asserted that there are 
not many other events of which the earliest or contempor- 
aneous records are so conflicting. Theologians have indeed 
sought to invalidate the significance of this observation by 
saying that Christian faith only requires that the general fact 
of the bodily resurrection of Jesus should be recognized, but 
that whether this or that detail in the records of it should be 
received is a matter not of faith but merely of opinion or 
criticism. This is a very convenient refuge no doubt for the 
apologist, whom it frees from much embarrassment, and from 
a large " surplusage " of difficulty, but the conflict between the 
narratives is such that the suspicion can hardly be resisted, 
that even the general fact, in which all three agree with each 
other (viz., that Jesus manifested himself to the disciples in 
bodily shape), never took place. There is every probability 
that, had there been an actual apparition, the relative circum- 
stances would have been faithfully treasured up in the tradition, 
and handed down with unvarying, or, at least, substantial con- 
sistency, though, it may be, with minor variations. Whereas, 
on the contrary, the several narratives exhibit that discrepancy 
of detail which is the unfailing characteristic of all mythical 
cycles ; a discrepancy, moreover, which, though by no means 
unknown in actual history, is little likely to occur, when, as in 
this case, there were no conflicting interests, and all the narra- 
tors were interested in the substantiation of the central fact, 
provided there was clear evidence of its occurrence. Had 
there been a fixed and well ascertained, or ascertainable 
nucleus of palpable fact, the details would, in all likelihood, 
have grouped themselves round it with some degree of con- 
sistency. But, in the absence of such a nucleus, the phantasy 
was left to revel without control, and to exercise its liberty 
without concerted plan, or any attempt to harmonize its 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 263 

creations with others of the same cycle. Such an attempt, 
indeed, would have interfered too much with the mythopceic 
license, and have postulated in these creations an element of 
consciousness and concert which is foreign to their nature. 

We hold that the many discrepancies which exist between 
the synoptic narratives of the resurrection form a very import- 
ant though secondary objection to their historical value except 
in a very qualified sense. Nothing can well be more absurd 
than to say with a distinguished apologist, that these dis- 
crepancies just suffice to show that we are dealing with his- 
tory and not with fiction. Discrepancy is an almost invariable 
feature of legendary cycles, and can hardly, in any case, afford 
presumption of the historical character of a narrative. The 
mere appearance of inconsistency, when it is cleared away, may 
create a prejudice in favour of a narrative; but if, when all is 
done, the inconsistency remains and is seen to be irreducible, 
no such effect is, or can be, produced. 

The apologetic position is hardly tenable, that these dis- 
crepancies cannot be real, seeing they cannot have appeared 
in that light to the early Church, which, from its proximity to 
the events, must be supposed to have been better qualified to 
judge of them and of their evidence than we of so late an age 
can be. The denial of this position in an unqualified form, or 
as an absolute canon, is the very nerve and postulate of all 
modern historical criticism. The critical spirit was very little 
developed in antiquity. The easy credence which antiquity in 
general gave to what was abnormal or supernatural is a proof 
and evidence of this observation, and the strong dogmatic bias 
or interest within the Church rendered its members more un- 
critical, if possible, than those who were outside. Once satis- 
fied, in the way we have yet to indicate, of the general fact, 
that Jesus had reappeared in bodily shape to his disciples, 
the early Church viewed all discrepancies of detail with ready 
indifference, and regarded all questioning of them (just as the 
rigidly orthodox do at the present day) as mere trifling, as 
proof either of a suspiciously captious and sceptical tendency, 
or of a spirit of reprehensible lukewarmness. We may even 
go further and say that, in the swing and ardour of that 
living movement, of that grand uprising of the spiritual life, 
any such investigation would have been, not unjustly, stigma- 
tized as ill-timed. Above all things it was necessary that the 



264 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

spiritual truth should establish itself as a power in life under 
any forms which lay ready to hand, or which the age could 
best appreciate. But the critical spirit of the present time, 
which is prompted by the yearning for truth and reality, and 
for the sight of things as they are, demands that the founda- 
tions of our faith should be narrowly looked into, and it is 
certain that our faith can no longer be preserved, merely by 
shutting our eyes to the difficulties which beset it, or by a 
blind reliance on authority, and an undiscriminating acqui- 
escence in traditional beliefs. For our part, too, we imagine 
that the truths which Jesus promulgated— the fundamental 
truths of Christianity — may now dispense with all such ad- 
ventitious aids to faith, and not only must, but can recom- 
mend themselves to our minds by their intrinsic authority. 

Thirdly, an essential peculiarity of these narratives is, that 
they require us to suppose that the apparition of the risen 
Jesus was that of a body without the properties of a body, 
of a body which, at will, could lay aside some and retain 
others of these properties ; which w T as either penetrable or 
impenetrable, coming near, perhaps, to the idea of what 
St. Paul calls a " spiritual body," whatever that may mean. 
Sober criticism must regard such a body, in spite of the 
ingenious fancies of certain orthodox physicists, as a mon- 
strosity, a self-contradictory conception. But the mythiciz- 
ing phantasy proceeds in its creations without regard to 
those conditions which limit the possibility of things. Its 
activity is conditioned by ignorance or obliviousness of 
the order which universally prevails, and it deals by pre- 
ference with objects and events which are exempt from the 
ordinary limitations of reality. Not being restrained or con- 
trolled by the idea of law, and moving in a sphere where 
natural law, physical and spiritual, has no consideration, it 
hesitates not to unite what is incongruous, and to reconcile 
the irreconcilable. In such a sphere anything whatever may 
happen, and nothing is incredible for him who believes in the 
existence of such a sphere. The power which is supposed to 
be above law 7 may be invoked to explain away every incon- 
sistency, and to account for every extravagance. 

Fourthly, the attempt has recently been made to create a 
presumption in favour of this great miraculous fact of the 
resurrection, by asserting that apart from it there is " no evi- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 265 

dence of the material laws and the physical forces of nature 
being controlled by the Supreme Power, so as to subserve 
spiritual purposes, and that it is the one event which puts us in 
possession of God and immortality." But this assertion does 
not commend itself to our judgment, for if there be no other 
proof of the supremacy in the divine scheme of the spiritual 
power, and of the subserviency to it of the material forces, we 
must conclude that no such providential arrangement exists. 
That idea is too important to be rested on a single fact in 
the world's history, a fact, too, which is without analogy and 
without precedent. Rather than believe that such a solitary 
fact has ever occurred, or that other facts of analogous descrip- 
tion, if they do occur, are yet hidden from observation — in- 
volved in impenetrable obscurity, until revealed by the light of 
this one, or brought by means of it within the field of human 
vision — we shall more readily believe that there is some flaw 
in the evidence of the alleged fact itself. 

But, leaving such negative considerations, we pass now to 
one which to many minds will seem to be more decisive of the 
question before us, viz., that the faith of the early Church in 
the reappearance of Jesus after his death may have sprung up 
and established itself in the creed, without the actual occurrence 
of the alleged fact, and that we can account for this faith 
otherwise than by supposing it to be in exact correspondence 
with the event which actually did occur to raise the disciples 
out of their despondent state. Some such explanation is neces- 
sary. For strong as may be our abstract, exegetical, and 
critical objections to the bodily reappearance of Jesus, we must 
yet admit that were there no other mode of accounting, first, 
for the sudden emergence of the disciples from their state of 
consternation and despondency; and, secondly, for the universal, 
immediate, and we may almost say, instantaneous belief of the 
Church in his resurrection, we should have to accept of it as a 
fact, however strange and unprecedented ; unless, indeed, we 
preferred indefinitely to suspend our judgment. The sense of 
the alternative thus presented to us, either of accepting the 
idea of a supernatural occurrence, or of providing some other 
conjectural explanation of the phenomenon, has had the effect 
of suggesting or calling forth various attempts at some natural 
explanation. 

The first of these suggestions is, that the body of Jesus was 



2 66 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

snatched from the sepulchre ; whether by friends or foes, and 
for what purpose, is left uncertain ; and that advantage was 
taken of this circumstance by the disciples to spread the report 
that he had burst the bands of death, and manifested himself to 
them. For this conjecture there is not a shred of probability ; 
for, even admitting the fact of the disappearance of the body 
from the tomb, it is yet a long way from this to the origination 
and currency of the report. As the report passed into circula- 
tion almost immediately after the death of Jesus, it is not easy 
to see how, on the supposition now referred to, this could have 
happened without the connivance, more or less active, of the 
leading disciples. The mere fact that the body of Jesus had, 
in some way unexplained, disappeared, could not possibly, in 
their despondent state of mind, suggest to them that he had 
returned to life again, and still less could it warrant them to 
give countenance to the report that he had shown himself alive 
to them. Such a tissue of falsehood and imposture on the 
part of men who bore a principal share in the great moral 
and spiritual movement which followed, is so inconceivable, 
and so abhorrent to the mind, that all ingenuous men must 
dismiss it from their thoughts, and exclude it from the region 
of possibilities. 

A second conjecture, which is that of rationalism, involves 
Jesus himself, along with his disciples, in the charge of impos- 
ture. According to it, Jesus did not actually expire on the 
cross, but awoke in the tomb from that state of unconscious- 
ness, and of suspended animation, which was produced by the 
lengthened torture of his sufferings. He rose again, not from 
the dead, as was supposed, but only from the grave, and re- 
appeared among his disciples. But this conjecture, though it 
has had a " sort of fascination for many eminent theologians " 
and men of science, is not merely devoid of any support from 
the Gospel narratives, but, besides that it leaves much unex- 
plained, is ludicrously inadequate to account for the great 
rebound in the minds of the disciples. If, as no one doubts, 
the circumstances of the crucifixion are in the main historical, 
Jesus must have been in a fearfully exhausted and bloodless 
condition before his removal from the cross ; and how could 
his reappearance in that dead-alive state ever have restored 
the disciples' faith in him as the triumphant Messiah, or have 
presented him to their imagination as the conqueror of death. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 267 

How could the real state of the case have been concealed from 
the world at large, as it must have been, except by means of 
a conspiracy, and collusion between Jesus himself and his 
disciples — a supposition of which it is unnecessary to express 
an opinion ; it being morally impossible that one who was the 
author of the Sermon on the Mount, and who braved the most 
deadly danger in carrying out its principles into practice, could 
ever have lent himself to such a fraud. Evidently, too, what- 
ever may have been the sequel — whether Jesus permanently 
recovered, or quickly succumbed under the effects of his suffer- 
ings on the cross — there must have been a deliberate and con- 
certed suppression of the truth in the report which the disciples 
made to the world of what they had seen and heard. It is 
enough to say that men who could be guilty of such a fraud 
could not possibly have furnished the " foundation " on which 
Christianity was built. 

For the reasons assigned, we reject both of these explana- 
tions. But as the Gospel narratives agree with the universal 
faith of the early Church in testifying that Jesus reappeared 
to his disciples after his crucifixion, it is impossible to get rid 
of the idea that some great fact underlay this belief, while, at 
the same time, the discrepancy of detail in the narratives goes 
far to render it probable that this fact was of a nature, more or 
less impalpable, so as to admit of various recital and various 
construction. And just such a fact is that which is dealt with 
by the so-called " Vision-Theory " — the explanation which is 
now generally accepted in critical circles, though it does not 
satisfy us. According to this theory there was nothing real, 
substantial, or objective in the apparitions, or Christophanies, 
recorded in the Gospels, but all was phantasmal, visionary, 
spectral, and subjective. The figure which presented itself to 
the senses of the disciples was a form or image imprinted on 
the retina, not by any external object, but by a reflex action 
of the brain or mind of the disciples — an image which, being 
impressed on that membrane from within, projected itself into 
outer space according to the laws of ordinary vision. Physio- 
logical observations have shown conclusively that such pheno- 
mena are of not infrequent occurrence, so that a priori there is 
nothing incredible in the supposition that something of this 
nature was what befel the disciples ; that, in the profound 
grief into which the disciples were plunged, in their anxious 



268 THE NATURAL HISTORY OK 

and half-despairing expectation of the return of their Master 
from the world of spirits — suggested to them, it may be, by 
words which he had dropped in their hearing, more or less 
disregarded at the time, but now recalled to memory as a sort 
of forlorn hope — this reflex power of the mind may, in Peter, 
in Mary Magdalene, or some other disciple, have come into 
play, and called up a vision to the eye ; and that, by the con- 
tagion of sympathy, the vision may have spread, as is usual in 
analogous cases, from one disciple to others who were in the 
same predisposed state. This is the " Vision-Theory." 

Still, for various reasons, we do not accept this theory, to 
replace that of an actual apparition. This theory presupposes, 
in one or all of the primitive disciples, not indeed an ecstatic 
state of mind, or a proneness to hysteria, or some form of 
hallucination, of which there is no apparent sign so far as can 
be judged from the records ; but, at the very least, a state of 
expectancy, for which we have no evidence whatever, of some 
such event as the resurrection and reappearance of Jesus. If 
we may trust to what is narrated of the women who, more faith- 
ful than their male companions, remained in the vicinity of Jesus, 
when these forsook him and fled (to Galilee), there is even 
evidence to the contrary ; for they, we are told, prepared spices 
and unguents to embalm the body, and thus afforded a clear 
proof that they, and by consequence the others, had no expecta- 
tion of an immediate resurrection. This fact alone, if it be allowed 
to stand, throws very considerable suspicion on the historical 
value of those passages in the Gospels which represent Jesus as 
declaring that he would rise again in three days. Indeed, it 
is hardly conceivable that he should have done so. He may 
have perceived that everything in the natural course portended 
a fatal termination to the work in which he was engaged ; 
he may even, in the conviction of his Messiahship, have enter- 
tained some hope that God would, as already said, interpose at 
the last moment, if not before, in his behalf (Matth. xxvii. 46); 
or failing such interposition, he might yet be confident that 
he would come again to finish his Messianic work on earth. 
All this we may believe, because we cannot tell how far his 
Messianic consciousness might carry him. But that he should 
have predicted his resurrection on the third day would have 
betrayed in him a lack of sobriety, a degree of fanatical 
enthusiasm which would lower him in our esteem, and of 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 269 

which we see no indication in his character as depicted in 
the Gospels. 

What there is of probability in supposing that the disciples 
may have expected his resurrection on the third day, is mainly 
founded on what he is reported by St. Matthew and St. Luke 
to have said of the sign of the prophet Jonah. But few 
things can be more certain in this regard than that what 
Jesus said of this sign was neither intended nor calculated to 
give countenance to such an expectation. 

It seems that the Pharisees demanded of him a sign from 
heaven in confirmation of his doctrine, and, in the Gospel of 
St. Mark, Jesus is reported as making the curt and peremptory 
reply, " There shall no sign be given unto this generation." 
These words admit of being understood as a concession that 
none of the works which accompanied his teaching were 
miracles in the strict sense of the term. More probably, 
however, they only meant that no sign from heaven such as 
the Pharisees demanded should be given to them. But the 
tradition, as represented by St. Luke and St. Matthew, was not 
satisfied to rest here. The early Church may have felt that 
a sign of some sort was necessary to confirm the claims of 
Jesus to be a teacher sent from God. Hence St. Luke, as its 
spokesman, represents Jesus as saying that the sign which he 
would give would be like that of the prophet Jonas, which 
consisted in the preaching of the prophet— a very different sort 
of sign from that which the Pharisees sought, and therefore 
quite in keeping with the spirit of his declaration in St. Mark, 
that no sign would be given. 

By its appeal to the consciences of the Ninevites, the call 
of the prophet carried in it its own authority, and was a sign 
to them ; and such also was the sign which Jesus would give 
to his countrymen. This is the plain and obvious meaning in 
St. Luke's report of the language. But in St. Matthew's Gospel 
the revising, commentating hand has been at work, and the 
sign in the case of the prophet, which is the point of com- 
parison between him and Jesus, is made to consist in his 
temporary imprisonment in the whale's belly, a circumstance 
which the Ninevites are never said to have had any knowledge 
of, and which could therefore have been no sign to them. 
And the report of St. Matthew contradicts that of St. Mark, 
both in letter and in spirit. For if Jesus here said that he 



270 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

would give the Jews a sign by rising again from the dead on 
the third day, this was just to give them the promise of such a 
sign as they did ask for, and in so far a distinct contradiction 
of what, according to St. Mark, he did say. 

This revision of the words of Jesus is in many ways signifi- 
cant, and may easily be accounted for. We may suppose that, 
on separate and independent grounds (yet to be explained), it 
had become the fixed faith of the Church that Jesus had risen 
again from the dead on the third day. But when it was 
observed that the duration of his entombment, though not 
entirely agreeing with that of Jonah's imprisonment, yet nearly 
coincided with it, the early Church could not refuse the sugges- 
tion or reject the temptation to believe that the one was the 
type of the other. The reference to Jonah therefore was so 
altered as to make it appear that the sign of which Jesus spoke 
consisted in the miraculous portion of Jonah's history. In this 
way the deep and fine significance of his words, the true point 
of comparison, was put out of sight ; a limping and irrelevant 
comparison was instituted in its place, and a proof apparently 
given of the prescience of Jesus. This instance is one among 
many which show how freely and arbitrarily the mythical 
phantasy dealt with facts and sayings which tradition had pre- 
served ; how prone the Church was to give a prophetic and 
supernatural colour to the simplest words of Jesus, and to 
adapt the obscure and poetical language of the Old Testament 
to the beliefs which had taken root in the minds of its 
members. We can, with much show of probability, even 
assign the independent ground on which the faith that the 
resurrection took place on the third day was founded. 

Nowhere in the New Testament is it said that Jesus was 
observed by the disciples in the very article or act of rising 
again, and that the event took place on the third day, rather 
than on the day preceding, may have become the generally 
received belief of the Church, only after some hesitation and 
diversity of opinion. (Compare Matth. xxviii. 1, with Luke 
xxiii. 54, with Keim's remarks on the subject.) It is easy to 
conceive how this happened. The experiences of the disciples, 
which were interpreted by them as the manifestations of the 
risen Jesus, befel them, let us suppose, on the third day. In 
that case it was natural for them to think that on that same 
day he had also risen again, and this probability would be 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 27 1 

confirmed for them when it was discovered, as it would soon 
be, that there was prophetic language to countenance the sup- 
position. In Hosea vi. 2 occur these words, " After two days 
will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we 
shall live in his sight." 

That these words contain a prophetic allusion to the 
resurrection of the Messiah is far from apparent. But in the 
absence of any definite information or testimony respecting 
the exact time of its occurrence, these words of the prophet, 
which, whatever they allude to, were really meant to indicate 
a short period of indefinite duration, were understood of a 
definite period, and so understood, were quite sufficient to 
determine or confirm the belief of the disciples in regard to 
the date of the resurrection of Jesus. For it is observable 
that we have data for thinking that the third day was partly 
fixed upon in deference to some prophetic authority. Thus, in 
Luke xxiv. 46, the risen Christ is represented as opening the 
understanding of the disciples, that they might understand the 
Scriptures, and saying to them, " Thus it is written, and thus 
it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third 
day"; and in 1 Cor. xv. 4, Paul says that Christ rose again 
from the dead on the third day, " according to the scriptures." 
The fact of the resurrection was to Paul's mind sufficiently 
proved by the various manifestations of Jesus to the disciples, 
himself included. But he can only appeal to the Scriptures of 
the Old Testament as an evidence of the day of its occurrence. 
The words of Hosea, which the Apostle probably had in view, 
were enough to satisfy him on this point, and it may be that 
the same words may have contributed to settle the doubts of 
the Church at large. But there is no proof that these words, 
any more than the words of Jesus respecting the sign of the 
prophet Jonah, had raised an expectation of the resurrection 
before those experiences of the disciples which seemed to prove 
that it had taken place. The application of the words to the 
event was an afterthought. No sooner was it believed that 
Jesus had risen again than the question pressed for an answer, 
" When did it take place ? On what day, or at what hour ? " 
And the passage in Hosea, most probably, was eagerly caught 
at, as seeming to give to a question, which there was no proper 
means of settling, an answer which, by reason of the Christo- 
phanies on the third day, the disciples were disposed to accept. 



272 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

We repeat, therefore, that there is no reason for thinking that 
the disciples were in that expectant state of mind which, 
according to psychologists, is the condition generally present 
of phenomena such as those on which the vision -theory of the 
resurrection of Jesus is made to hinge. 

As already observed, it is a notable circumstance or feature 
of the evangelic narratives that the disciples are not repre- 
sented as having been present to witness the resurrection at the 
moment of its taking place. Had these narratives been mere 
inventions, the likelihood is that this would have been the 
thing represented, as affording the most simple and direct 
evidence of the fact. But the mythical phantasy was at this 
point controlled, by having to deal with an actual experience, 
yet to be described, of the disciples ; and it never departed 
from this fact so far as to represent the resurrection itself as an 
object of vision. 

In the above remarks we have proceeded on the supposition 
that the Evangelists are historically correct in representing that 
experience of the disciples, whatever it was, as having befallen 
them on the third day after the crucifixion. But it may here 
be observed that this supposition is involved in some doubt. 
If the experience of the disciples, which they construed as a 
bodily appearance to them of the risen Messiah, befel them 
in the vicinity of Jerusalem, there is nothing to be said against 
its occurrence on the third day. But there are several indica- 
tions, as many have felt, that these experiences took place not in 
that neighbourhood at all, but in Galilee,* probably near the sea 
of that name, amid scenes still warm with the thought of their 
Master, and from which the light of his presence had not yet 
faded. Mark xvi. 7, xiv. 28, Matth. xxvi. 32, have not with- 
out reason been regarded as surviving traces of an early tradi- 
tion to the effect that the scene of the so-called Christophanies 
was Galilee, which was distant by a straight line of fifty or 
sixty miles from Jerusalem, and much further by the route 
which avoided Samaria. Now if, as seems to have been the 
case (Mark xiv. 50, Matth. xxvi. 56), the disciples fled to 
Galilee as soon as Jesus was apprehended by the Jewish 
authorities, and left him to his fate, the report of his cruci- 

* See in connection with this point the very striking use which Chancellor 
Weizsacker makes, in the very first paragraph of his great work, of the well- 
known passage in Tacitus. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 273 

fixion would take two or three days to follow upon their heels, 
and, allowing two or three days more for the paroxysm of their 
grief to expend itself, it may have been nearly a week after the 
crucifixion till the great recovery took place. And, if this be 
so, the inference is, not that the third day was conjectured to 
be the day of the resurrection, in order to synchronize it with 
the Christophanies ; but, on the contrary, that the conjecture 
was guided simply by the words of the Old Testament already 
referred to ; so that the Christophanies were made -to syn- 
chronize with the prophetic language, and that, as a necessary 
consequence, the scene of these was transferred to the neigh- 
bourhood of Jerusalem. The true order and sequence of the 
events may have been too natural, too commonplace, and 
perhaps too humiliating to be retained in the tradition. And, 
in fact, the fabling fancy could make nothing of the merely 
spiritual crisis through which, as we shall yet show, the disciples 
passed, and therefore not only transformed it into a Christo- 
phany, but laid the scene or the scenes of it in the vicinity of 
the tomb, so as to place the resurrection itself en Evidence im- 
mediately after its conjectured occurrence, to fill up the interval 
between the third day of prophecy and the mysterious occur- 
rences in Galilee, and also to gratify Jewish-Christian feeling by 
representing Jerusalem rather than Galilee as the point from 
which Christianity started on its world-wide career. 

To return to the vision-theory. Another objection to it 
may be drawn from the infrequent occurrence and sudden 
cessation of the phenomenon. Had Jesus actually manifested 
himself to the senses of the disciples, we could understand that 
he would do so only as often or as seldom as he chose ; and we 
could be no judges of his reason for presenting himself before 
them just so many times and no more. But if the apparition, 
as the vision-theory will have it, depended on the agitated state 
and conflicting emotions of the small band of disciples, we are 
entitled on physiological grounds, and by historical analogies, to 
expect that the phenomenon would continue to repeat itself 
until the agitation had gradually subsided, and a considerable 
time had elapsed. 

But from the Gospels, as well as from St. Paul's enumeration 
of the phenomena, which latter must be accepted as the most 
authentic record which we have, it is apparent that such was 
not the case. St. Paul's enumeration, which has few points 

s 



2 74 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of contact with the synoptic narratives, is put forward as 
exhaustive ; and from it we gather that the apparition was 
repeated only six times, his own being included in the number. 
His own experience was also the last in point of time, and 
was separated from the other five, it would seem, by a con- 
siderable interval. And if we take into account that it 
occurred not much more than two or three years after the 
crucifixion, there is a strong likelihood that the Evangelists 
have preserved the true state of the case, in so far as they 
represent all the rest as having occurred either on one and 
the same day, or within a day or two of each other. No 
doubt St. Luke, in the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, 
says that Jesus continued to show himself to the disciples 
at intervals for forty days after his resurrection. But, account 
for it as we may, this additional record is hardly reconcilable 
with that of his Gospel : that is to say, if we are to be 
guided in our judgment by the ordinary laws of criticism. 
But even if we succeed in harmonizing this record with that 
of the synoptists, it is plain that the alleged Christophanies 
were few in number and abruptly terminated — a distribution 
of the phenomena which is far from probable, if it be not 
incredible, and suggestive of the idea, that they w r ere not what 
they are by the vision-theory represented as being. Not to 
anticipate what has in the sequel to be said of the vision, 
which, as we believe, was -actually seen by St. Paul, and of 
the contribution which his testimony makes to the critical 
inquiry, we may remark here that it is easy to account for 
the fact that his vision was not followed up by others of 
the same kind. Evidently he stood alone, cut off for the 
time from sympathy and intercourse with any community of 
believers. The conditions of propagation w r ere thus in his 
case awanting ; but the singular thing is, that phantasmal 
phenomena of the kind, if they occurred to the earlier disciples, 
should have ceased so abruptly in a community in which 
sympathy was rife, and mental agitation, as a producing cause, 
was kept up by the heat of numbers, and by the interactive 
friction of mind with mind. 

Yet another objection to the vision-theory may be found in the 
observation that the occurrences represented as visions by that 
theory befel the twelve disciples and the five hundred brethren 
simultaneously. Notwithstanding the analogies to this detail 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2/5 

which have been culled from Huguenot and Camisard histories 
and other sources, we hold it to be an insuperable objection 
to this theory. The simultaneity of impression made upon 
many minds favours the idea of an objective manifestation 
rather than that of the subjective vision-theory. But we 
hope to show further on, when we come to discuss the 
experience and the testimony of St. Paul, that it harmonizes 
with a view of the occurrences quite different from either of 
these; in other words, with the subjective, yet not visional 
character of these occurrences. 

Finally, it has often been objected to the vision-theory, 
that, if the fact were such as it supposes : if the disciples 
had their faith in Jesus restored by an apparition which had 
no existence except for the inward eye ; by a vision which, 
originating in the mind, had projected itself into outward 
space, through the reflex or reverse action of the mind upon 
the retina, the Christian faith would be ultimately traceable 
to what, after all, was neither more nor less than an ocular 
illusion. Now, we do not admit the entire justice of such a 
criticism, or the force of the objection to Christianity w T hich 
is founded on it, for to us it seems that, if an illusion of 
the kind actually took place, the credit of our religion might 
still be rescued in this apparently compromising connection. 

It could be supposed that the vision was not the cause, but 
the effect of a faith, already inchoate, in Jesus, his character 
and doctrine ; merely the form in which the springing faith 
took possession of the minds of the disciples : that a mental 
crisis had supervened of such an extraordinary nature, that 
by the rapport existing between body and mind, it was accom- 
panied by a physical phenomenon scarcely less extraordinary, 
and which, as was natural, so engrossed the attention of the 
subjects of it as to indispose or incapacitate them for attending 
to what was passing within them. The possibility of this 
rapport was unknown and unsurmized by St. Peter and his 
companions ; and the relation between the physical and mental 
would necessarily seem to them to be the reverse of what we 
suppose. They were as men but half awake, or in a dream, 
who do not mark or understand the sequence of events, and 
are apt to transpose cause and effect. The fact is well 
known to physiologists, that our dreams often seem to lead 
up to, and to terminate in what is rather their exciting cause : 



2/6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that, however protracted in appearance to our consciousness, 
they are often but of momentary duration, the beginning 
and end of them being coincident. Proofs and illustrations 
of this curious fact may be dispensed with here, as many- 
such may be found in works treating of psychology. And 
if we bear this fact in mind, there will appear to be nothing 
impossible in the idea that the vision, to which the disciples 
ascribed the recovery of their faith and courage, may have 
been evoked in the very turmoil and struggle of their minds 
towards the new faith which was dawning upon them ; and 
that, in short, the vision was born of that to which it seemed 
to give birth. 

But, when we have got this length, it still remains for us 
to account for the new faith itself which arose in the minds 
of the disciples, independent of, though accompanied by, or 
creative of the vision, and if we succeed in explaining the 
origin of that faith, then the vision, if it did ensue, will lose 
its primary place in the genesis of our religion, and sink to 
quite a secondary and subordinate, if we may not say, an 
unessential place, because it had no intrinsic or genetic con- 
nection with the faith. And following up the train of thought 
thus suggested, we may at length arrive at the conclusion 
that nothing of the kind may have occurred ; that there was 
no vision whatever, actual or apparent, in the case ; so that 
nothing remains to be gathered from the narratives beyond 
the fact that there was a moment in the experience of the 
disciples at which the conviction flashed upon their minds 
that Jesus w r as yet alive and present with them in spirit, and 
that the idea of the vision was subsequently called in as a 
literary, popular, or sensuous representation of a grand and, to 
the disciples themselves, mysterious crisis in their inner life. 
The points of difference between their experience and that 
of St. Paul on a similar occasion will have to be afterwards 
considered. # 

* By way of accounting for the faith of the early Church in the resurrection 
of Jesus, it has by some been deemed sufficient to say, that that was a very 
credulous, legend-loving age, fond of the marvellous, such as the resurrection 
and reappearance of men from the dead ; and that it had no gift or talent 
for the sifting or weighing of evidence. Proofs of this feature of the age are 
to be found even in the Gospels, where it is said that when Jesus began to 
excite astonishment by his teaching and manner of life, his countrymen were 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 277 

Meanwhile, with such a solution of the phenomena in our 
view, we go back to the state in which the disciples were 
plunged by the unexpected catastrophe of the death of their 
Master ; and we put to ourselves the question, whether it was 
not possible that they might, on rational grounds and in 
obedience to the higher instincts which had been awakened 
in them, resume their faith in their Master and regain their 
courage after that shattering blow had fallen, which, besides 
breaking for the time the spell which he had cast upon them, 
and thrusting them from that elevation of the religious life to 
which they had risen in intercourse with him, had overwhelmed 
them with consternation, and left them nerveless, dispirited, 
friendless, and forlorn in a hostile world. That they all 
forsook him and fled (Matth. xxvi. 56) describes the im- 
mediate effect of that blow : they were thrown by it into a 
state of confusion and panic, and deprived of the power of 
reflection and of receiving a proper impression either of the 
events which were passing under their observation or of the 
mental changes of which they -were the subjects. 

But after the first paroxysm of grief and fear was passed, 
reflection would come back, and would turn to nothing so 
naturally as to the behaviour of their beloved Master under 
those trying and appalling circumstances which had deprived 
them of all presence of mind and of all self-command. They 
would perceive that the fatal turn of events which had seemed 
to invalidate his claim to be the Messiah was really calculated, 
by his behaviour under it, to confirm that claim more than 
aught else which they had seen or known of him before ; that 
it had applied the severest test to his character, and that he 

disposed to regard him as one of the old prophets, or even as John the 
Baptist come to life again, after being put to death by Herod ; that Herod 
himself was perplexed by the rumour, and that even among Christians a 
legend gained ground that when Jesus rose again the graves were opened 
and the bodies of the saints rose up and were seen by many in Jerusalem 
(Matth. xxvii. 52). But it seems to us that the prevalence of a weak and 
unreasoning credulity, while it might explain the propagation and persistence 
of a report concerning the resurrection, after it was once set in circulation, 
yet goes but a little way in reducing the difficulty of accounting for the origin 
of the belief under circumstances so unfavourable, and for the energy with 
which, from the very first, it animated the minds of the disciples. And it is 
this undoubted and most remarkable fact for which we try to account in 
the text. 



278 TIIK NATURAL HISTORY OF 

had stood the test without flinching- ; so that they had greater 
reason than ever to trust his word and to venerate his person. 
They would see that he had been faithful unto death to the 
principles he had inculcated, and that in his mouth these were 
not mere flowers of rhetoric, or words of course, or of tem- 
porary excitement, but words of truth and soberness, for which 
he was prepared to live or die. His nobility of character, his 
patience under injury, his splendour of devotion and fortitude 
would shine forth with new lustre, and make them feel that it 
was simply impossible to conceive of him as a blasphemer, an 
impostor, or self-deceiver — between which conception and faith 
in his Messiahship there was for them no intermediate position. 
They would remember that the fate which had overtaken him, 
though it had been too much for their courage, had not 
deprived him of self-possession or brought to light any flaw 
or weakness in his character, but had been met by him with 
calm intrepidity and unshaken constancy. 

A living theologian of much insight has said that Christ 
transfigured the cross, and, by dying upon it, changed it to 
human imagination from being an ignominious and loathed 
instrument of death to be the symbol of life ; and he regards 
the suddenness and completeness of this change as one of the 
strangest and most certain of historical facts. Now that the 
cross has been glorified by the death upon it of its grandest 
victim is no doubt true ; but when we view the crucifixion in 
connection with the genesis of Christianity, we may regard it 
as a truth of still greater significance that the cross glorified 
the Christ. The spiritual sense of the disciples had been so far 
trained and educated by their intercourse and association with 
Jesus as to discern the hidden "glory" of the cross — i.e., of the 
death of Jesus upon it. No act of his life " became him " or 
exalted him so much in their eyes, or so revealed his true 
greatness, as his death. It was not the Christ who, in the 
first instance, transfigured the cross, but the cross which trans- 
figured the Christ. And this difference in the mode of viewing 
the matter is not without significance — the one view fitting in 
with the supernatural, the other with the natural construction of 
Christianity. At all events, the mode and spirit in which 
Jesus laid down his life was what above all else transfigured 
him in the eyes of his disciples and confirmed his claim to be 
the Messiah or the Christ. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 279 

To these considerations we have yet to add this, that the 
catastrophe, though it had come upon them unawares and 
taken them by surprise, had not been uncontemplated by him, 
but had found him ready and prepared, and that there had 
been much in his teaching that might have prepared them also 
for the issue. He had taught them that the enmity of the 
world might be incurred by the friends of God ; that the 
suffering of persecution for righteousness' sake might be the 
avenue to bliss ; that heaven might be entered through much 
tribulation ; that the loss of life might be the means of saving 
it ; and it was natural to suppose that what was applicable 
to them was no less applicable to him. Elements of thought 
were in this way supplied, from which faith might spring anew, 
and confidence in him and his doctrine be restored, in spite of 
that disastrous eclipse which he had undergone ; nay, possibly, 
all the more in consequence of it. They might perceive that, 
in all that had befallen, there was no reason for the renuncia- 
tion of their faith in him. Current opinion among their 
countrymen went strongly, it is true, against the idea of a 
suffering Messiah. For though this idea, as distinct from that 
of the suffering servant of God, had been mooted in the syna- 
gogue, and had received countenance from at least one passage 
in the book of Daniel (which is,, however, of doubtful inter- 
pretation), yet we may affirm none the less, as we have already 
done, that it had no such practical hold of the Jewish mind, 
as to overcome the prejudice otherwise excited against Jesus. 
And, indeed, it is plain that sufferings and distresses which 
the people themselves had inflicted on Jesus could not possibly, 
without a too manifest self-contradiction, be regarded by them 
as a note or proof of his Messiahship. Still, taking the claim 
made by Jesus to be the Messiah in connection with much 
of his teaching, it must have become evident to the disciples 
that that idea of a suffering Messiah was not abhorrent to him 
at least, and this observation must have gone far, after his 
death, to reconcile their minds to it ; the observation, we mean. 
that however strange and novel the idea may have been to 
them, as to the rest of their countrymen, it had nothing in it 
strange or deterrent to him, but had been accepted by him as 
indicative of one of the possibilities to which he had exposed 
himself in undertaking the Messianic office. This, we say, was an 
observation which would come to the aid of their reviving faith. 



2<So THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

The crucifixion of Jesus was, as we have seen, a crushing 
blow to all those worldly hopes which the disciples had built 
upon their connection with him: to hopes which prevented the 
birth of the pure ideal in their minds. When all such hopes 
were crushed and gone, there would be an interval of blank 
despair, during which all would be cold and dead within them. 
But the mind of man is so constituted that it does not willingly 
surrender itself to despair ; it does not easily or all at once 
give up a long and fondly cherished hope. The impression 
which Jesus had made upon the disciples had been too deep 
to permit of being effaced without a struggle, and we may 
be sure that their minds would react against the feeling of 
despair into which they had for a time been plunged, and 
begin again to hope against hope. Purified by that terrible 
disillusionment, hope would spring up anew within them. 
And the question would present itself to their minds, whether 
they could yet retain that splendid vision of holiness and 
immortal goodness in the death of all those carnal hopes 
with which, to their apprehension, it had hitherto been en- 
crusted, or, had they to renounce both at once? Who will 
venture to deny that in that wreck of earth-born hopes that 
vision might disengage itself and stand forth anew in the light 
invisible, and that in that self-same hour it might seem to the 
disciples as if Jesus himself had risen again to view in more 
glorious state than ever, in a form no longer carnal, but 
spiritual ? 

At this point we may throw in two not immaterial observa- 
tions. The first is, that if we may believe that the disciples 
might rise, by an act of the spiritual reason rather than by 
means of a visual or corporeal apparition, to the conviction that 
the crucified Jesus was alive in God, we are thereby delivered 
from the intolerable strain put upon our reason and our scien- 
tific conscience by the necessity of believing in a miraculous 
and wholly abnormal event as the foundation of our spiritual 
life. The other observation is, that if this great spiritual 
revolution in the minds of the disciples were to take place at 
all, it was in conformity with psychological principles that it 
should take place suddenly on the third, or some early day 
after the crucifixion, rather than at some considerably later 
period. For besides that spiritual revolutions, however pro- 
tracted in preparation, often, if not always, come suddenly at 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 28 I 

the last, and seem to be the affair of a moment, we have to 
consider that, in this case, the conditioning circumstances were 
all present ; the flood was at the full, and if not taken at once, 
the conditions might have shifted and never have recurred. 
It was quite in the nature of things, therefore, that if the gloom 
which fell upon the disciples was ever to pass away, the period 
of its continuance should be brief and its dissipation sudden. 
This circumstance would render the event the more striking 
to the senses, but does not suffice to invest it with the char- 
acter of miracle. 

Our endeavour throughout this discussion has been to 
explain the genesis of our religion by reference to certain 
simple and well-recognized principles of human nature, or to 
analogous facts, taken in conjunction with what we conceive 
to be the critical deposit of the canonical records, and we 
pursue the same plan in elucidation of the great turning 
point in the history of Christianity at which we have arrived. 
Now, we do not proceed far in the history of religion before we 
learn that the human mind is endowed with marvellous elas- 
ticity, and that there are occasions on which, under the 
inspiration of an idea, it rises at a bound from the depths 
of despondency to the height of confidence in itself and in 
God. As by a flash from heaven, a new light covers the face 
of the world. And just such an occasion was it, we believe, 
on which St. Peter and his companions threw aside their 
doubts and regained confidence in their Master, which, now 
that he had signally illustrated his own ideal, was really 
identical with confidence in the truth which he taught. They 
accepted him at once as Messiah in a higher sense than 
prophets had dreamt of. They perceived that he had realized 
in his own person that idea of God's suffering servant, which 
they now felt to be a higher idea, morally, than any which they 
had hitherto connected with him, whom they had been accus- 
tomed to long for. To believe that though put to an igno- 
minious death by the priests and rulers of the nation, he 
was still, as he had professed himself to be, the Messiah ; and 
that now, when he had been violently cast out from the earth, 
he had been caught up into heaven and passed into the 
presence of God, were one and the same faith. For it was 
simply impossible for the disciples to believe that he, who 
had so evidently walked with God upon earth, and had raised 



282 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

them by intercourse with him into the same fellowship, could 
be less than the Messiah, or be elsewhere than in the bosom of 
God. The imposing authority which he had formerly exerted 
over them asserted itself anew in spite of the shock it had 
received from his crucifixion. Then they had believed in him, 
expecting to find in him all the marks of the Messiah; which 
expectation made faith easy to them. But now, in the absence 
of all such marks, they had discovered that he had other marks 
upon him greater than those they had asked for. 

No more painful or more depressing situation can be con- 
ceived than that of the disciples when their Master was torn 
from their side. But in his short yet intimate intercourse with 
them, he had prepared them for this hour, for this critical 
conjuncture, and it was soon seen that he had not laboured 
in vain. The impression made upon their minds by his 
doctrine and personality survived the dreadful ordeal to which 
their faith in him was exposed. His life and teaching had 
been one great appeal to their religious instincts, and these 
instincts being thus called forth and exercised by use, now 
asserted an authority above that of the priests and teachers of 
the nation. The verdict pronounced by these latter against 
his doctrines and claims had no authority over men who had 
learned to recognize in him a higher authority. The impres- 
sion which Jesus had made upon them was that of a life 
manifestly hid with God : and the depth of that impression 
was shown by its power of self-retrieval after the shock it had 
sustained by his death ; in the case of Judas by his remorse 
and suicide ; in the other disciples by their advance to a higher 
view of his person than they had been able to take while he 
was with them in the flesh. Purified from the dross of earthly 
ambition, their feeling of reverence w r as intensified into a 
sentiment of adoration. The discovery that there was nothing 
more to hope for from him in the way of earthly honour 
and distinction, threw them with utter singleness of intention 
upon the spiritual benefits which he had conferred upon them. 
Forced by the catastrophe to accept his theory of the kingdom 
of God, and of the divine life, they took an immense step 
which involved a complete change in their religious views. 
While the worldly expectations which the)* had hitherto 
associated with the Messianic idea were demolished, they 
yet retained their faith in him as the Messiah. In proportion 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 28 3 

as these expectations had dimmed their spiritual vision did 
the relinquishment of them seem to more than restore to 
them the Messiah whom they had lost. They saw him im- 
mediately in a transfiguring light, and his words came back to 
them with a new meaning and a new significance. The effect 
of his death was not to dishonour but to glorify him in their 
eyes ; and the ideal which his teaching and personality had 
suggested to their minds became identified with himself in 
their consciousness, and fused into one with his image. 

If, to reconcile the shame and humiliation of the cross with 
the glories predicted of the Messiah, the minds of the disciples 
leaped forward at this crisis, or in the sequel, to the idea of his 
second advent, by which all these predictions should be fulfilled, 
this was a thing which, situated as they were, so naturally 
followed their conviction of his exaltation into heaven, that it 
might be, but hardly needed to be, prompted by the apokalyp- 
tist (Dan. vii. 13), where he represents the Son of Man as 
coming with the clouds of heaven to receive everlasting do- 
minion and glory. The disciples were satisfied that the triumph 
of righteousness was only deferred, and that, like Job, they and 
their Master would yet be comforted by receiving the reward 
of suffering and the fruit of righteousness. Yet, if their 
thoughts at this conjuncture did take this turn, we can see how 
•little foundation there is for saying that "at first the disciples 
loved their Master because they believed he would realize their 
(Jewish) ideals, but that at last they loved him because they 
made his ideals theirs." It may be fairly questioned whether 
his ideals ever became theirs fully. They loved him to the 
last chiefly because of his grand soul-subduing personality ; it 
was for this that they gave him devotion and veneration. But 
never, even after the cross had revealed him in a higher light, 
did they fully understand and adopt his ideas as ideas. Such 
at least must be our conclusion, if we may judge from the 
broad fact that this hope of a second advent for so long re- 
tained possession of their minds, and that their ideas of Jewish 
privilege for so long presented an obstacle to the spread of 
Pauline universalism. 

The crucifixion was to some extent the death of those 
worldly hopes, which were integral elements of the Messianic 
idea then current, and were still clung to by the disciples, in 
some measure, to the last. For a moment it seemed as if, with 



284 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the extinction or disappointment of these hopes, the spell which 
Jesus had cast over them were broken once for all, and their 
faith in his Messiahship were irretrievably gone. But this state 
of mind lasted only for a day or two ; the impression made 
upon them had been too deep to be effaced by a single blow, 
too entrancing and too inextricably bound up with their re- 
ligious sympathies and spiritual instincts to be renounced with- 
out a struggle, without an energetic reaction of their minds 
against such a calamity. Between the " two pains, so counter 
and so keen," of faith and doubt, the struggle may have been 
severe. But, freed from the alloy of worldly expectations, the 
faith of the disciples would rise anew from its collapse, as by a 
natural and unobstructed buoyancy ; helped, it may be, by the 
recollection that Jesus himself had never entertained such 
hopes, or only held them loosely, and that it had been no part 
of his teaching to excite such hopes in their minds, but rather 
the reverse. Not seldom, as we have seen, had he in their 
hearing, and for their instruction, muttered gloomy presentiments 
of the fate to which he was advancing ; and so far was he from 
encouraging in them the expectation of a triumphant progress 
or a prosperous issue, that he emphatically damped all such 
expectations ; and in the moment of their highest elation, when 
the conviction of his Messiahship had flamed up in their minds, 
he had begun from that time forth to show to them that he 
must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things, and be killed. 
According to the uniform testimony of the Gospels, he allowed 
it to be seen that he shrank from the fate which awaited him, 
but submitted to it as a necessity imposed upon him. The 
blessedness which he told them of was never of a kind which 
excluded suffering, and the way to life was through the shadow 
of death. When he spoke in this fashion the disciples could 
not understand what he meant, and were simply bewildered. 
The idea of a suffering Messiah, and of a blessedness of which 
suffering and death were necessary elements, were all but un- 
intelligible to them. And it was only when suffering of the 
direst kind had overtaken both themselves and their Master 
that they recalled his words to mind, and better understood 
what he meant ; and the fact that this fate had been foreseen 
and foretold by him was what came to the aid of their faith in 
that time of extremity. " If" (we may conceive them as 
saying to themselves), " if the presentiment of such a catas- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 285 

trophe did not shake his faith in himself and in his Messiah- 
ship, why should its fulfilment shake ours ? Might not the 
popular notion of the Messiah be a false one ? Had not 
Jesus, by the patient heroism and unresisting fortitude with 
which he met his fate, revealed himself in a more glorious 
light than would have been possible in a career of unchecked 
triumph and success?" Their intercourse with him had, no 
doubt, trained them to appreciate the higher moral beauty of 
his character, and to see in the manner of his death a new 
evidence of his Messiahship. As Peter was the first to 
recognize the previous evidence, it is just what we might 
expect when we find that he is represented as being also the 
first of the male disciples to recognize this new evidence, and 
to catch a sight of the risen Saviour; risen, that is, into a higher 
beauty. Thoughts which require time for us to trace, and to 
present in a succession, which may not, moreover, correspond 
with the actual order of their sequence, may all have been com- 
pressed into the feeling of a moment, or have risen simul- 
taneously in the minds of the disciples. 

To our notion, one great achievement of Jesus, one grand 
result of his life and of his behaviour in death, was really this, 
that he thereby impressed his disciples with the conviction that 
his was a life in God, a life essentially immortal, so that when 
he died he could not be holden of death — his death could only 
be a passage from a mortal to an immortal life. His life had 
been so manifestly divine that his disciples could not believe it 
to be extinct, or to be less eternal than the life of God. The 
crisis in their thought was brought on simply by the intensifica- 
tion of a feeling which is common, or rather universal, among 
men : of the reluctance which all men experience to admit the 
idea that those whom we have loved and honoured have gone 
clean out of existence when the band which connects the soul 
with the body is dissolved. This reluctance grows and mounts 
with our feeling of veneration and dependence on the being we 
seem to have lost. When Jesus died, it was to the disciples 
inconceivable that a life of such divine beauty should have 
lapsed ; that a being so godlike, so victorious over the fear of 
death, and so defiant of its terrors, should be subject to its 
power. All that had been visible of him, all that was mortal 
of him, had been consigned to the tomb ; but this undeniable 
fact could not prevent the rising conviction that the spirit 



2 86 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

within him had escaped, and soared into a new life in a higher 
and happier sphere. The sudden birth of this conviction in 
the minds of the disciples we hold to have been the true 
Christophany, the apotheosis of Jesus. 

Admitting, however, that the disciples regained their confid- 
ence in Jesus in the way we have now pointed out, and became 
assured that he had passed into the divine presence, we have 
yet to ask, or to explain to ourselves, how it was that they and 
their converts became possessed by the further conviction that 
he had revealed himself in bodily shape to their eyes. In ex- 
planation of this curious, this fateful, world-historical circum- 
stance, the consideration immediately presents itself, that the 
underlying spiritual fact, such as we suppose it to have been, 
was manifestly of such a nature that in order to pass into 
popular belief, and to adapt itself to ordinary, i.e., rude, average 
intelligence, it had necessarily to undergo a process of deposi- 
tion, i.e., of transition from the spiritual to the material or 
sensuous form. There was a necessity that the spiritual idea 
which had suddenly sprung up and taken absolute possession 
of the few disciples should, in order to its permanence and 
transmission to the general mind, throw itself into the form of 
an outward historical event, which might incorporate and em- 
brace details, in which consistency, as of minor importance, 
might not be observed. We do not mean to say that the 
disciples perceived this postulate of the situation, and know- 
ingly threw their experience into this literary form ; but we 
mean to say that the situation was favourable to an interpreta- 
tion of that experience which the disciples were otherwise, as 
can easily be shown, disposed to put upon it. In the delight- 
ful conviction that they had not really lost their friend and 
Master, who still lived and loved them ; in the ecstasy and 
tumult of soul produced by the inrush of that novel, far- 
reaching thought, they were hardly conscious, as one after 
another they were seized and caught by it, of what was taking 
place in their experience. The effect of that ecstatic state 
of mind, in making them unobservant of the changes going 
forward within and around them, was akin to that of the panic 
and consternation into which they had been thrown by the 
fatal turn of events which led to the crucifixion. There was 
little of voluntary or conscious effort in this supreme crisis and 
revolution of their thought. Just as has happened in many 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 2$? 

conversions in subsequent times, they were, or seemed to them- 
selves to be, transported or carried out of themselves by a 
power which seemed to come upon them " from outside," or 
by an inspiration which, in reality, was but the outcome of 
past impressions now reasserting themselves ; of impressions 
which had been made by the teaching and personality of Jesus 
upon their religious instincts, and had now revived after tem- 
porary effacement. Still more mysterious and inexplicable 
would the crisis appear to them afterwards to be, when they 
came to reflect on a moment of such immense significance. 

It might even seem as if, unknown to them, Jesus had been 
spiritually present ; or, as if their inner sense had perceived a 
real presence which their outer senses did not perceive. And 
when the words of Jesus which they could not formerly 
understand, and the presence which they could not fully 
appreciate, came back upon them with new power, it would 
seem as if Jesus had manifested himself anew, alive from 
the dead, and been present with them in spirit, if not in body. 
The impression received from converse with him had never 
been really obliterated, but only for a time suspended ; the 
manner and heroism of his death, when they reflected on it, 
would do more than restore the ascendency which he had 
gained over their faith ; and this restoration of their faith 
in him would be equivalent to a new manifestation of Jesus to 
their souls ; to a resurrection of Jesus in them, which in the 
earthquake and upheaval might be confounded with one which 
had objective reality. 

What then actually took place on a day or days immediately 
subsequent to the crucifixion was, not that Jesus rose again 
from the dead, but that the disciples, commencing with Peter, 
emerged suddenly, as in a moment, from the more than 
sepulchral gloom, into which they had been plunged by the 
death of Jesus, and in which it seemed as if the light of faith 
had been for ever extinguished. The faith which was latent 
in their very grief and despair flashed forth into flame, reveal- 
ing Jesus to them in a new and purified light. It was as H 
Jesus had risen from the tomb and shown himself alive again. 
The effect of what they experienced was as great as would 
have been produced by the restoration of his bodily presence 
to the midst of them. In the perturbation and ecstasy of the 
moment, they were in the state, in which the soldiers on guard. 



2 88 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

who arc mythically said to have seen the angel at the sepulchre, 
are represented as being ; (Matth. xxviii. 4) " as dead men," or 
as men who dream ; for whom the partition wall between the 
outer and the inner world has ceased to be. Little accustomed 
as the disciples in their simplicity were to watch the workings 
of their own minds, to analyze their own sensations, or to 
retrace the steps by which they reached a conclusion, and little 
able to explain to themselves what had happened, they might, 
when they tried to recall and realize that mysterious crisis, sup- 
pose that Jesus himself had actually been present, unknown to 
them, as he is said to have been to the two disciples on the way 
to Emmaus, in some semi-spiritual, semi-corporeal shape. For 
it is not at all unlikely that the mythical details, which have 
accumulated round the tradition of his resurrection, may, in 
this and other cases, only reflect in a sensuous or outward form, 
the moments or reminiscences of mental experiences which 
befel the disciples. 

There is yet another consideration which may here be taken 
into account, viz., that what had found and electrified the 
immediate followers of Jesus was not so much his oral teaching 
as rather the living and moving exemplification of it in his own 
person. During his lifetime, it was the spell of his personal 
influence which drew disciples and bound them to his side. 
Their intercourse with him, besides attaching them to his 
person, communicated to them somewhat of his own elevation 
of feeling, of his deep religious sentiment, and his sense of 
fellowship with the unseen world. But this influence depended 
for its continuance upon his presence in the midst of them, 
and was apt to fade gradually away, if not to vanish suddenly, 
if he were removed from their company. That that influence 
might be permanent it required to be exerted, not in the 
form of a memory of what he had been for them, but in the 
form of a sense of his abiding presence : of a conviction, that 
though he had vanished from their sight, by being caught up 
into heaven, he was in some real sort present with them still. 
We may therefore conjecture that, after his death, a sub- 
consciousness that such was the case may have fired a 
craving in their minds to have his presence restored and 
perpetuated among them, as the only means of maintaining 
that high condition of their souls, without which life thence- 
forth could hardlv be tolerable. For a moment or moments 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 289 

of spiritual elevation it might even seem as if that craving had 
been gratified ; as if Jesus had presented himself spiritually, if 
not bodily before them ; and to their mounting faith that 
moment of intense realization might ever after serve as a 
pledge of his abiding presence, and form the germ out of 
which grew in time their belief in his omnipresence and 
divinity, besides, in all probability, finding expression for 
itself in those farewell words attributed to Jesus in the mythical 
tradition : " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world " (Matth. xxviii. 20). 

The reader will at once perceive that the theory here 
propounded is not open to the objection, which is fatal to the 
vision-theory, viz., that while it is perfectly conceivable that 
a vision might befal Peter by himself, or James by himself, it 
is not conceivable that such a thing cculd befal all the twelve 
disciples simultaneously, and still more the five hundred 
brethren mentioned by St. Paul. For, on the other hand, it is 
quite conceivable that a wave of feeling, a thrill of conviction, 
as to the Messiahship of Jesus, and the risen life and spiritual 
presence in the midst of them of their crucified Master, may 
have passed over and agitated such a multitude when the 
impulse was given by the breathing words and burning emotion 
expressed by St. Peter, and communicated by him first to the 
interior circle of his brother apostles, and through them to the 
greater multitude. We have only to conceive that all the 
multitude consisted of Galilaeans, predisposed as Peter himself 
had been, by veneration for the memory of Jesus, enhanced by 
the spectacle of the sublime devotion with which he had con- 
fronted his death, to catch up a higher conception of his 
character, and to take up again the hopes which they had 
built upon him, but had for a moment lost their hold of. 
That conception and these hopes when presented to them 
anew by Peter and James would come upon them as a 
revelation, or an illumination, which could, as already pointed 
out, only be described figuratively as a vision, or veritable and 
bodily manifestation of the risen Jesus. It would seem to 
themselves perhaps, or to others at least, to whom they spoke 
of it, as if Jesus, or their mental image of him had risen before 
them in a new transfigured aspect. The representation of the 
great experience could only transmit itself to others in a form 
more or less sensuous ; in which form it would rapid!)', if not 

T 



290 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

instantaneously, establish itself as historical fact in Christian 
tradition. 

To account therefore for St. Paul's testimony to the vision of 
the five hundred brethren, our theory requires that a wave of emo- 
tion, a thrill of conviction, had passed over them ; a revival after 
eclipse of their former faith in Jesus, which, in being revived, 
became exalted and intensified ; and that this inner change or 
process became for themselves, or for those to whom it was 
reported, identified with an outward and visible manifestation 
of Jesus to their senses. We take the process or incident to 
have been an example of a phenomenon not unknown or un- 
familiar to the classical nations of antiquity, analogous to those 
sudden (and simultaneous) impressions, generally of panic 
terror, but sometimes of quite an opposite character, which 
take effect on multitudes as on one man, and are attributed to 
the voice or other manifestation of a divine, or at least mysterious, 
presence. In his fifth volume of the History of Greece \ Mr. 
Grote calls attention to a phenomenon or incident of this kind 
which is typical, and by no means a rare or solitary instance 
in ancient history, nor without parallel in modern and more 
recent times. Following Herodotus, Mr. Grote tells us that 
when the Greeks were about to advance to the charge at 
Mykale, a divine Pheme (0>/m ? 7> fama), or message, to which 
a herald's staff, floating towards the beach, was the signal or 
symbol, flew into the Greek camp, acquainting it as by a 
revelation, sudden and unaccountable, that on that very morn- 
ing their countrymen in Bceotia had gained a complete victory 
over the Persian host under Mardonius. The anxiety which 
had previously prevailed among the Greeks was dissipated 
in a moment, and, filled with joy and confidence, they charged 
the opposing host with irresistible energy. Such, adds Mr. 
Grote, " is the account given by Herodotus, and doubtless 
universally accepted in his time, when the combatants of Mykale 
were yet alive to tell their own story." Incidents of a similar 
kind have occurred in ancient and modern times, but we 
single out this one, because, as just said, it is typical. And 
we remark upon it that the situation of the Greeks on the 
foreign strand at Mykale, in the presence of a hostile force 
far superior in number, and strongly posted, was in the highest 
degree critical, and felt to be so by the Greeks themselves. 
They were, moreover, aware that their compatriots were facing 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 29 I 

the still more powerful army of Mardonius in Boeotia, and that 
even their own victory, if achieved, would be of small avail s if 
Mardonius gained the victory on their native soil, in the heart 
of Greece. While these anxious thoughts weighed on even- 
individual in the Greek army, the herald's staff, or some object 
resembling such a staff, was observed to be floating towards 
the shore on which they were drawn up ; and to men, who, 
under the influence of pious and anxious feeling, were on 
the outlook for signs and omens, this object seemed to be a 
prognostic or revelation that the battle had been fought and 
won by their countrymen at home. This impression shot like 
an inspiration or common spontaneous feeling through the 
Greek army, " effacing for the time each man's separate indi- 
viduality." The explanation of the simultaneity of the feeling 
is to be sought in the universal Greek habit of looking for 
omens, and in the anxiety which at the moment pervaded 
the army, predisposing every individual in it to receive the 
impression, which, according to Greek ideas, the herald's staff 
was in such circumstances fitted to give. It was a welcome 
omen which all could interpret, and at the moment nothing 
was thought of beyond this. But afterwards, when people 
began to reflect on it, the idea of a divine voice or influence, of 
which the herald's staff was only the outward and visible 
sign, was called in to account for the suddenness and simul- 
taneity of the impression which pervaded the army. 

An idea or impression may thus arise and take possession 
suddenly of many minds, of which no man can tell the source. 
Under certain conditions a faith may thus shoot through a 
multitude as by an electric shock, presenting a phenomenon so 
bewildering and otherwise inexplicable, that men naturally 
seek an explanation of it in some mysterious and unknown 
force. 

The situation of the five hundred Galilaeans was similar to that 
of the Greeks at Mykale, in respect of their being dominated 
and possessed by one common idea, and placed by events 
that had recently befallen them in the same mental attitude. 
They were all " brethren," i.e., men who had enjoyed the benefit 
of intercourse with Jesus during his lifetime, who had listened 
to his teaching, who had been deeply impressed by his words 
and deeds, penetrated by one common feeling of enthusiastic 
veneration for his person, and of passionate regret that he 



292 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

was now lost to view ; united by one common idea that he 
who had so manifestly walked with God on earth, could hardly 
have fallen a helpless victim to human malice ; all therefore- 
prepared, as one man, for some great and triumphant vindi- 
cation of his transcendent worth and Messianic character. 
The slightest impulse or signal from without would suffice 
to change that passive and expectant state of mind into one 
of energetic faith and action. And just such an extraneous 
impulse was given, we may suppose, by the enthusiastic 
declaration of St. Peter and the other apostles of their con- 
viction that Jesus had passed from the cross on earth to the 
throne in heaven. Such a declaration to minds so predisposed, 
would act on them as a spark on explosive materials, or as the 
" feather touch " which crystallizes water into the solid state. 
This we believe to be the natural explanation of the simul- 
taneous experience of the five hundred brethren. But this ex- 
planation not being recognized or thought of by the disciples, 
they afterwards explained the seemingly mysterious occurrence 
to themselves and others by the supposition of some intervening 
divine agency ; or more definitely, by a spiritual manifestation 
of Jesus to their minds, which gradually grew to be regarded 
as having taken place in the shape of a bodily manifestation of 
Jesus to their senses. 

Had there been no victory in Bceotia, the effect of the omen 
in imparting victorious confidence to the Greek army at 
Mykale would have been the same ; and so, even though Jesus 
did not rise again, the faith of that event gave to his followers 
the victory over the world ; it became to them " a fact of their 
consciousness as real as any historical event whatever, and 
supplied a basis for the historical development " of the Church 
and its dogma. The great critic, to whom we have more than 
once referred, began his history of the Church by laying down 
the dictum that this faith alone is the subject of history, while 
the nature of the resurrection itself lies outside of historical 
inquiry. We therefore regard the genesis of this faith as 
belonging to what we have called the pre-historic period of 
Christianity, and have treated it as a subject, not of historical, 
but of psychological investigation. 

According to our view then, the disciples of Jesus recovered 
their faith in him by a mental revelation, an inward experience 
or spiritual crisis ; by a crisis so great as to stun their minds ; 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 293 

so sudden and unique as to appear to them to be mysterious 
and supernatural, the work of a divine and extraneous agent. 
But even were we to suppose that the disciples did not them- 
selves believe that their assurance of the new life of Jesus was 
owing to an apparition of their crucified, but risen Master, 
there would yet exist the difficulty of explaining to others what 
had actually befallen them, the nature of their experience, and 
the grounds of their faith; the difficulty of unfolding the steps 
of thought or the evolution of feeling by which they had 
reached the conviction that he who had been trampled on and 
cast out from the earth had been caught up into heaven 
to the right hand of God, from thence to exercise authority 
over them, to be a law to their lives, and to come again on the 
clouds of heaven to be the Judge of men. 

They could explain the great experience through which 
they had passed, the revolution in their consciousness, only 
in language which, literally understood, would seem to imply 
an outward manifestation of Jesus to their bodily senses. 
And this explanation would be accepted all the more readily 
because it would suggest a level and adequate cause for the 
otherwise inexplicable boldness and confidence with which 
these simple-minded, unbefriended men proclaimed their faith 
to a hostile world, and assumed the aggressive under circum- 
stances which, but for some such experience, must, to all 
ordinary reason, have appeared to be dispiriting and dis- 
couraging in the highest degree. 

It would thus come to pass that a crisis, which in its nature 
and its cause was rational and spiritual, would be transformed 
in imagination and general report into one which was effected 
by a cause at once supernatural and physical. What took 
place here is analogous to what took place with regard to the 
answer which Jesus made to the two disciples whom John 
sent to ask him whether he was the Messiah. According to 
the more historical narrative of St. Matthew, Jesus referred the 
messengers to his powers of healing the (possibly spiritual) 
diseases of men, as the credentials of his Messiahship. But St. 
Luke, in his version of the incident, makes it to appear that 
Jesus referred the messengers to the miraculous cures which 
he performed " in that same hour " in their presence, thus 
substituting or suggesting a literal meaning of his words for 
the figurative meaning. Just so it was that the first teachers of 



294 TI1K NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Christianity, when, in addressing the people, they spoke of their 
great spiritual experience ; of the truth which had manifested 
itself to their consciences ; would of necessity employ language 
which might admit of being understood of a visible manifesta- 
tion of Jesus in person to their bodily senses. The confidence 
with which they asserted, in the face of a sceptical world, 
that Jesus was alive again and had risen from the dead, 
could hardly be otherwise accounted for by the multitudes. 
The language in which these simple and uneducated men 
were able to express themselves was a rude instrument of 
thought. They were unacquainted with any dialect in which 
their thoughts, or rather their feelings, could be rendered 
intelligible to the minds of others who were not in the same 
mental condition as they were, or had not passed through 
the same experience. They were reduced to the necessity of 
expressing spiritual perceptions by means of figurative lan- 
guage, which was apt to be literally understood, and which so 
understood conveyed ideas wide of the reality, but yet sen- 
suously representative of it. 

Either they did not fully and clearly apprehend the move- 
ments of their own minds, and could not retrace the course of 
thought by which they had reached their convictions, or they 
were unable to carry others through a similar process, and 
to explain it in language which others could understand. 
That sudden flash of intelligence which had revealed Jesus 
to them in a new light, and thereby raised them out of their 
state of despondency, could only be described by them as a 
vision of the risen Jesus. To all inquirers they could only 
say, " We know that he has risen again, for we have seen him." 
They had seen him, indeed, with the spiritual eye, but they 
were understood as having seen him with the outward eye, 
and this acceptation of their testimony, while approximately or 
figuratively descriptive of their experience, saved them all the 
difficulty of further explanation. The words expressive of 
their belief (yjO*o-to? aveo-Tij) became a form of salutation, and 
the perpetual repetition of this form without explanation would 
help in some measure to favour the process. Still another 
circumstance which operated in the same direction may be 
seen in the fact that there were passages in the Old Testament 
which might be understood of a resurrection of the Messiah, 
and that the Jews of that age, as already noticed, perceived 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 295 

no great a priori objection to the report that this man or that 
had risen from the dead and been seen alive again. 

Yet further, even if the immediate disciples of Jesus were aware 
of their inability to communicate to the minds of others those 
spiritual impressions of which they were profoundly conscious, 
except by the use of figurative language which admitted of a 
literal construction far enough from corresponding with the 
actual fact, yet it is conceivable that they might shrink from 
the responsibility of correcting the notions thus inadequately or 
unintentionally disseminated. The very proneness of their 
converts to adopt the notion of an actual Christophany might 
produce a fear in their minds that they themselves had been 
blind to the real nature of the mysterious experience which 
they had gone through ; and that they might arrest the 
diffusion of the new faith, if they were to raise scruples and 
misgivings as to the nature of their own testimony. Somewhat 
in the same way that many persons at the present day may be 
persuaded of the non-supernatural origin of Christianity, but 
dread the effect upon society if such a persuasion became 
general. Or again, it may be that, satisfied in their own minds 
of the claim of Jesus to be the Messiah, and of his risen life 
and ascension into heaven, they might think it of comparatively 
small importance how the like faith might be communicated to 
other minds. 

If in looking back to that mysterious evolution of Messianic 
thought in the minds of the personal disciples of Jesus, on the 
hypothesis we have explained, we can, with all our psycholo- 
gical knowledge, hardly trace the process, and cannot but 
recognize its unique character and its surpassing gravity, we 
may well believe that the disciples in whom the evolution 
accomplished itself, were in no better position than we arc to 
do so, while they were much more ready on reflection, and in 
their exalted state of feeling, to ascribe it without hesitation or 
suspense to some supernatural agency, which, at the time it was 
operating, they might not wot of. And when in that time of 
ecstatic feeling the converts still more readily took up the 
notion of such an agency to explain the occurrence, the calmer 
judgment of the original disciples could hardly be expected to 
stand out against the ideas of men, who, for aught they knew, 
might be channels of an inspiration equal to their own. And 
if so, it is not the first nor the only case in which the 



296 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

enthusiasm of the convert has swept aside the better knowledge 
and discretion of the master ; and the interpretation of facts 
has given a new colour to the facts, and been accepted by 
those, who were themselves parties to their occurrence. 

We have seen what an important part in the genesis of the 
faith was played by the Messianic doctrine. For us the 
doctrine which Jesus preached and illustrated has a truth of 
its own, apart from and independent of his claim to be the 
Messiah. But for the primitive disciples, who were Jews, it 
was otherwise. For them that claim was part of his doctrine, 
and but for that claim, his revolutionary doctrine might never 
have gained their assent. The Messianic doctrine had been 
the growth of centuries, and by making good his claim to be 
the fulfilment of that idea, Jesus became to his followers an 
object of absolute devotion. He that served himself heir to all 
the hopes connected with that idea, and was enabled by help 
of this personal distinction to launch his doctrine upon its 
world-wide career, had a claim to a higher authority than even 
that of the law of Moses ; and in renouncing Jewish habits of 
thought and practice, the disciples seemed to have the counten- 
ance of Moses himself. By pointing to a Messiah, a prophet 
like unto Moses, the law had indicated a lurking consciousness 
of its own imperfection, and possible supersession. The faith 
of the better righteousness went along with the faith in the 
Messiahship of him who proclaimed it. And both faiths revived 
together in the disciples after the short eclipse they had under- 
gone at the death of Jesus. According to Jewish notions the 
Messiah could not die, or if he could die, he could not be holden 
of death, he could not see corruption. He could die only to live 
again with a new, a higher and an immortal life. The moment, 
therefore, the disciples regained their confidence in his claim to 
be the Messiah, he was for them alive again. He had been as 
good as dead while they were in despair, but the revival of 
their faith was a rising of Christ in them, which they could 
hardly distinguish from the objective fact of a resurrection ; 
which they could hardly but confound with it ; or, if this 
confusion was not in their minds — if they were fully cognizant 
of the subjective nature of their experience, yet, in its trans- 
mission by the vehicle of language, it could hardly but pass 
into the idea of an actual bodily resurrection, of which they 
had been the witnesses. And at this dav those of us who are 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 297 

unable to regard the resurrection of Jesus as an actual historical 
everlt stand beside the sepulchre of Jesus with the memorials 
of his life and the records of his teaching in our hands ; and 
have now, apart from the allegation of his bodily resurrection, 
and of his Messiahship, to decide according to the answer of 
our religious instincts, and to our much extended knowledge 
of the divine order, how far the doctrine which Jesus taught 
and illustrated contains in it the principles of true religion. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE MYTHICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE EVANGELIC 
TRADITION. 

Having thus seen how the belief in the resurrection of Jesus 
took root in the mind of the infant Church, we proceed to 
remark that a starting point was thus furnished, an impulse 
given, to what is called the mythical construction, i.e., the 
metamorphosis, the embellishment, or, in a word, the denatural- 
ization of the entire evangelic tradition, including and probably 
beginning with that respecting the resurrection. For while the 
mythopceic process was stimulated by a belief in the simple 
fact of the resurrection, it is natural to suppose that the process 
thus stimulated and set agoing, would not only embellish the 
life of Jesus, but also in turn add detail and circumstance to 
the resurrection itself. The belief that the personal disciples of 
Jesus had been favoured with a Christophany would, of course, 
be vague at first and indefinite ; but, as time went on, a 
multitude of details not necessarily very consistent with each 
other would grow up around it, by way of dramatizing it, or 
drawing it out into separate scenes ; such, e.g., as that he was 
not only seen again, but also heard to speak ; that he said this 
and that, that he partook of food, that his apparition was that 
of a real body, which admitted of being touched and handled, 
that the marks of the nails were visible, that he appeared and 
disappeared at will, as a spiritual being might be supposed 
capable of doing, that one of the disciples doubted at first but 
was afterwards convinced by the evidence of his senses ; and 
lastly, the cessation of these manifestations was accounted for 
by saying that he took his final departure from the earth by 
ascending in the presence of his disciples into the clouds. But 
the mythicizing process which thus supplied details to the 



NATURAL HISTORY OK THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 299 

vague belief of the resurrection so as to visualize it or make it 
representable to the fancy, performed a like service to the 
events of his lifetime also. The tradition of these latter was, 
we believe, revised, moulded, and coloured, so as not only to 
visualize them, but also to exalt the person of Jesus, by 
exhibiting him as a wonder-worker, and by attributing to him 
such miracles as might form a lifelike vehicle of pathetic 
expression in dramatic form of the more or less common and 
normal phases of the great and varied religious experience to 
which Christianity had given rise. This is evidently an 
important part of our subject, upon which it will be necessary 
to dw r ell at some length. 

That much of ancient history has undergone a mythical 
transformation there can be no doubt whatever. But it has 
recently been said that after being an object of dread forty or 
fifty years ago, the mythical theory in its application to gospel 
history no longer excites attention, but " has disappeared like 
water absorbed in the earth." This observation is somewhat 
ambiguous. It may mean that Christianity has survived the 
shock which seemed to be given to it by that theory ; 
which is true. But if, as seems to be intended, the meaning is 
that the theory, as applied to the gospel records, is now dis- 
credited and thrown aside, the observation is only remarkable 
for its singularity and its disregard of fact. For the theory 
did not originate with Strauss, and has not disappeared with 
him. And if little, comparatively, is now expressly said of it; 
if it has in a great measure ceased to be matter of discussion, 
the reason is that it is so established in the theological mind as 
to be substantially accepted, even by those who hold to the 
supernatural elements of Christianity, and applied even by 
them, within varying limits, to the critical study of the Gospel 
records. In its application to these it has passed into the 
thoughts of many, and will not easily be dislodged. 

By the manner in which Jesus had encountered and braved 
the last extremity of suffering, he had given a crowning proof 
of his greatness, had restored the disciples to faith in his 
Messiahship, after its momentary eclipse, and had satisfied 
them that, as Messiah, he had ascended into the " heavenly 
places," into a sphere which gave unfettered scope to their 
imagination. Their faith, resuscitated, was more than it had 
been before the trial to which it had been subjected. That 



300 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the disciples should now regard Jesus with feelings of height- 
ened veneration, and impute to him a greatness which, amid 
the common-place of his earthly life, and the familiarities of 
personal intercourse, they had never dreamt of, was inevitable. 
They would feel as if, while he lived and communed with 
them, their eyes had been holden so that they could not know 
him, as is said of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus. 
They would be amazed that they had not discerned his 
hidden glory when he was yet with them ; they might even 
reproach themselves for the slowness and obtuseness of their 
understanding, and what more natural than that they should 
seek to atone for their culpable stupidity by importing a 
marvellous element into acts and sayings of his which were 
quite within the compass of humanity, and by investing every 
incident of his life with a miraculous character. 

This tendency, natural in their situation, was at the root of 
the mythicizing process ; but it is not necessary to suppose 
that this process owed, to the personal followers of Jesus, much 
more than its inception. They had been the witnesses of his 
earthly career, and their recollection of its incidents was pro- 
bably too vivid and fresh to permit of their taking an active 
part in that process. At most they may have been passively 
implicated, by not interfering authoritatively to put a stop to it 
during their lifetime. But we conceive of it as being actively 
carried on afterwards, if not then, by their converts, who stood 
at a greater distance from the events, and knew of these only 
by reports which seemed to them not to do full justice to one 
whom they regarded as the Son of God ; by men, that is, who 
wished to see in his life the concrete embodiment of much 
of that new religious experience which they traced in some 
more or less indefinite way to that model life of his. For, it 
must always be kept in mind, that probably fifty years or still 
more elapsed between the close of that life and the final 
revision of any of the synoptic Gospels. 

In all probability no part of the earthly life of Jesus escaped 
this mythicizing, metamorphic process. There were treasured 
up, in reverent remembrance, the outstanding facts of his life ; 
its general course or scaffolding ; the catastrophe of its end, 
and the substance of its teaching and doctrine, and a super- 
human and miraculous character would be impressed upon all, 
so far as there was an opening for it ; so far as the tradition 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 301 

seemed to lend itself to or to invite such a treatment ; or even, 
in so far as it could be transformed into a vehicle to symbolize 
the salient and ever-recurrent features of the Christian life. 

At many points of the evangelic history there are unmistak- 
able traces of such a process. In the fourth Gospel a process 
of a somewhat similar kind is carried on under such thin 
disguise as to have escaped detection, only in consequence of 
the uncritical state of mind which characterized the early age 
of the Church ; and to have been screened from observation in 
later times only by dogmatic pre-suppositions which men 
brought with them to the examination of Gospel history. But 
reserving our remarks on the fourth Gospel for a subsequent 
section of this essay, we proceed here to say that traces of 
the mythopceic process are distinctly visible in the earlier 
Gospels ; as, e.g., where the idea which appears in one Gospel 
in the teaching of Jesus in the form of a parable is in 
another Gospel made the basis of a miracle alleged to have 
been wrought by him (comp. Matth. xxi. 19 with Luke xiii. 
7) ; or where a transaction, which in one Gospel proceeds on 
the ordinary level of human life is in another exalted into the 
region of the marvellous. In some few cases of this kind we 
can see the metamorphosis going on under our very eyes as it 
were, and can mark its successive stages. 

It does not fall within the scope of this discussion to illus- 
trate the various statements which are made in the course of 
it. But in illustration of what has just been said, we ask the 
reader to compare Matth. xxvi. 1 8 with Mark xiv. 1 3 and Luke 
xxii. 10. The incident here recorded presents, in Matthew's 
version of it, nothing of an unusual character. Jesus gives the 
name of the person in whose house he wished to partake of 
the Passover — a name possibly familiar to the disciples, though 
not preserved in the tradition. According to the other two 
versions he tells the disciples that by taking a certain route 
they would meet a man, of whom presumably they knew 
nothing, and whose encounter with them Jesus could foresee 
only by a supernatural prerogative. That is to say, that the 
later revisers of an ordinary incident have converted it into a 
miraculous incident. To mention only another instance of a 
similar kind, we ask the reader to compare Matth. ix. 20 with 
Mark v. 25 and Luke viii. 46. What actually occurred to the 
woman mentioned in these parallel passages was, that she felt 



302 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

herself cured at the moment she touched the hem of the gar- 
ment. This is all that is said by St. Matthew ; but the ex- 
planation had suggested itself that the cure had been effected 
by a virtue which went out from Jesus for that purpose ; and 
as the report passed from mouth to mouth, Jesus was made 
first to feel the going forth of this virtue, as we see in Mark's 
account, and then to say that he did, as in Luke's account. In 
other words, the miraculous or materialized interpretation put 
by popular fancy upon the incident is incorporated in the 
narratives, and thrown into a dramatic form. In these in- 
stances we have a hint or example of what no doubt took place, 
by a uniformly operating tendency, in many other instances 
in which we cannot trace the process, or see it taking place 
under our eyes. The conversion of the simple, non-miraculous, 
incident into the miraculous fancy may, in many instances, have 
been accomplished by the witnesses or spectators, all uncon- 
sciously, in the very moment of its occurrence ; or, if not that, 
the transmutation may have taken place before the tradition 
was committed to writing ; so that we have no means left, as 
in the above instances, of proving or tracing the transition from 
the one form to the other. In either case, some event in the 
life of Jesus, or some saying of his, indistinctly remembered, 
or imperfectly understood, has served as a suggestion to the 
religious phantasy, and has been by it made use of as a point 
d'appui for a construction of its own. Such suggestion may 
have been of the most general and distant kind. The thought, 
that if Jesus had not really worked some imaginable miracle, 
yet that he might have done so ; that it was not beyond his 
power, or that it would serve as an illustration of his doctrine, 
would be enough to set the phantasy to work. The super- 
human nature of Jesus having become a fixed idea, two results 
would follow, which in this connection deserve to be borne in 
mind. In the first place, this belief would tend, in the appre- 
hension of the Church itself, to transform the incidents of his 
earthly life, so as to bring them into keeping with that belief, 
and thus lead to a partial, unsuspecting reconstruction of the 
tradition ; and secondly, the Church would suffer to pass, or 
even deem allowable, any narrative that would help to impress 
the like belief upon the minds of inquirers or unbelievers. In 
the latter case the end was good if the means were question- 
able. But in truth, the mythicizing fancy, whether creating, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 303 

or only moulding its materials, acts more or less involuntarily 
and unconsciously; so that, what in a self-conscious and critical 
age might be immoral, will not incur such a sentence in an age 
in which faith controls or suppresses the play of the critical 
faculties, and in which the historical sense is, in a great measure, 
dormant and undeveloped. 

We may feel a difficulty in conceiving, or in representing to 
ourselves the possibility of the wholesale transformation of the 
life of Jesus which is postulated by the anti-supernatural hypo- 
thesis, as having been carried out by the synoptic tradition, or 
rather by the Church at large, whose floating and protean 
beliefs the Evangelists may only have caught and fixed by- 
placing them on record, besides summarizing and arranging 
them, each in his own way. But we shall not be staggered by 
this difficulty if we bear in mind that analogous cases in the 
religious sphere may be appealed to. It is hardly to be ques- 
tioned that the traditions regarding Zoroaster, Buddha, and 
other founders of religion have come down to us in a mythical 
or legendary form. It seems, indeed, as if there were some- 
thing in an active and excited state of the religious feelings 
peculiarly favourable to a process of this kind. Comparatively 
little tendency in this direction was exhibited in the case of 
Mahometanism ; but this was probably owing to the fact that 
the feelings to which the prophet of Arabia appealed were 
not strictly or purely religious or mystical, and that his revela- 
tions and the memorials of his life were committed to writing 
in the Koran during his own lifetime, by his own hand, or 
rather at his dictation — the effect of which was, from the very 
first, and ever after, to deprive tradition of its elasticity and its 
creative impulse, and to check or restrain within the narrowest 
limits the mythicizing proclivities of the faithful. 

Against the mythical theory as applied to the criticism of 
Gospel history, the objection is often urged that the mythicizing 
process is a work of time, and can only be carried on in a 
society and amid circumstances separated by a considerable 
interval from the events on which it employs itself. Such an 
interval, it is said, did not intervene between the date of the 
events recorded and the record of them in the Gospels. 
Indeed the interval is almost reduced to none at all, if we take 
into account the testimony of St. Paul. This seems to be a very 
strong, and to many even an insuperable objection to the 



304 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

prevalence of a mythical element in the Gospels. But its force 
is very much impaired, or even totally destroyed, if we take 
into account the following considerations. St. Paul's testimony, 
on which so much stress is laid, is really confined, so far as it 
here concerns us, to the fact of the Christophanies mentioned 
by him in I Cor. xv., and to the general belief in the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus founded upon them. Now, according to our 
mode of regarding them, these Christophanies were not mythical 
in the strict and proper sense of the word. They were only 
the materialization or externalization of a great spiritual 
experience, which actually befel St. Paul and the other apostles. 
And this externalizing process, while it imparted to that 
experience a supernatural character, was not a work of time at 
all but intrinsic to the apostles' mode of conceiving or inter- 
preting their experience. When the apostles turned their 
reflection upon their experience, and sought to explain to 
themselves what had befallen them, they could only conceive 
or speak of it as a manifestation to themselves of the Christ or 
of Jesus come to life again. The reality of the manifestation 
was for them the main thing which could not be called in 
question or admit of doubt. Whether it was corporeal or 
spiritual, visible or invisible, was, if problematical, of no moment 
to them ; but to those to whom their experience was reported, 
it would naturally be regarded as having been visible and 
corporeal, so that there is nothing to hinder us from conceiving 
how this could be the general belief in the Church at the date 
of Paul's conversion, i.e., two or three years after the crucifixion. 
Time was not required for the growth of such a belief. What, 
on the other hand, was a work of time was the operation of the 
mythicizing fancy upon the Christophanies, in the way of 
supplying details of time, place, and circumstance, so as to 
impart to them an air of " solid realism," and to present them 
pictorially or dramatically to the imagination. The same fancy 
was directed simultaneously, and in a like fashion, upon the 
events of the earthly life of Jesus, to exalt and supernaturalize 
them. But there is no evidence that either Paul or the original 
disciples took any part in this mythicizing process. As for 
St. Paul, we imagine that he was so much occupied with the 
dogmatizing process (in which, as we shall yet see, he took the 
leading part), that that other gave him little or no concern. 
Indeed, it is astonishing how entirely absent from his epistles 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 305 

is any reference (if we except that to the Last Supper) to the 
events of the life of Jesus ; and there is a presumption that his 
attitude in relation to that other process, so far as these events 
were concerned, was one of neutrality or indifference, if not 
even of impotence to check or control it. And we have 
already shown that by the time the tradition regarding the 
Christophanies was stereotyped by the synoptists, details had 
been introduced into it which were not in perfect harmony with 
the bare and simple facts to which St. Paul's statement was 
confined. We hold, therefore, that the earliest date to which 
St. Mark's Gospel, in its original form, can be assigned, i.e., 
about thirty years after the crucifixion, is also the earliest date 
at which we can be said to know anything approximately 
certain as to the state and progress of the Christian tradition ; 
not to mention that our knowledge thus acquired of the state 
of tradition at that early date is of a very uncertain kind, 
seeing that among critics there is hardly a doubt that St. 
Mark's Gospel, as extant, is a revision of its original form. 

It is alleged, however, that even that space of time is too 
short to admit of the transformation of the actual facts by the 
mythicizing process. But to many, and of late years, we 
believe to an ever increasing number, it has appeared that too 
much has been made of this demand for time, as well as of the 
distinction which has been drawn between the circumstances 
under which the evangelical and other mythical histories got 
into currency. If in the case of Buddha, for example, it could 
be shown (which we rather think it cannot be) that the process 
began long after his contemporaries and companions were off 
the scene, the process must at any rate have begun in the face 
of an existing tradition which must have had an authority little 
short of that of the testimony of companions and eye-witnesses. 
The truth is, that the genesis of the myth under any circum- 
stances is difficult to understand. The myth is a growth, and 
has the mystery and secrecy of all growths ; and it is much 
more likely to proceed apace in the midst of a tumultuous 
excitement produced by a great religious movement or spiritual 
experience which stimulates the imagination and the speculative 
faculties — an excitement whose source even those who are 
affected by it do not comprehend, but which they are afraid to 
undervalue — than after the excitement has subsided and the 
experience, though still propagating itself by sympathy, is yet 

u 



306 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

no longer so living and infectious or so apparently mysterious 
as at the first. Illustrations of these remarks might be drawn 
from the legendary history of St. Columba and other saints of 
the Roman Calendar. But enough has been said upon the 
subject. 

In the case now of the Christian tradition, the mythicizing 
process must have received an 'extraordinary impetus from the 
belief in the resurrection of Jesus ; a belief, which, as we have 
seen, was floated into currency by the literal interpretation of 
figurative language used to describe the great spiritual experi- 
ence or revolution in the thought and life of those who had 
enjoyed the disciplinary benefit of personal intercourse with 
him. This belief, indeed, was just the form in which that 
experience sought and found expression for itself, and devised 
the means of its own transmission to other minds. It was a 
belief which threw a new or retrospective light upon the earthly 
life of Jesus ; the resurrection being felt to be a master fact, 
which postulated an interpretation or construction in accordance 
with itself of that life, and of the catastrophe of its end. The 
belief of it stirred into activity the idealizing faculty, and 
suffused the actual facts of the life with a higher glory than 
was otherwise to be seen in them. And every touch or stroke 
by which the pious fancy could exalt the nature or function of 
the risen Christ found a ready acquiescence on the part of 
men who were possessed by that belief. To men whose entire 
thought was moulded by the moral and spiritual idea which 
had been impressed upon them by the teaching and personality 
of Jesus, it now grew to be a necessity, an intellectual delight, 
to illustrate that idea by embodying it on all sides, in words 
and actions which they ascribed to him. 

Then too, there were ample and abundant materials ready 
at hand to help, to guide, and to facilitate the process. The 
Christian or evangelic tradition was, as already said, not a pure 
creation, evolved from human consciousness ; it was rather the 
filling up of the given outlines of a great life ; it was built up 
upon the scaffolding which that life supplied. Add to this, 
that the memory of the personal disciples was stored with 
many surprising proofs which Jesus had given of his power in 
the healing of bodily and mental ailments, in changing the life 
and calming the fears and passions of men ; and these, after 
the great crisis, would present themselves as exertions of more 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 307 

than human power, and would be talked of in terms that to 
those who had not witnessed them would suggest that he had 
actually raised the dead, and given sight to the blind, and 
multiplied the loaves and commanded the elements. And 
yet further, the historical and prophetic books of the Old 
Testament furnished a perfect mine of materials and suggestions 
for the mythical construction. Those who believed in the 
Messiahship of Jesus (and such were all who believed in his 
resurrection) were bound also to believe that he had excelled 
all the deeds recorded of Old Testament heroes, and that the 
Messianic prophecies had all been fulfilled in him ; so that, 
wherever possible, the highly figurative language of these 
would be applied to him in a literal sense. In many well- 
known cases, there is, especially in St. Matthew's Gospel, an 
evident endeavour to do this without much regard either to 
probability or to the facts of his history ; to make out the 
correspondence between prophecy and fulfilment to be much 
more exact than it was ; even to give a prospective or prophetic 
meaning to language which was clearly retrospective or 
historical, and otherwise to set all the laws of sober exegesis 
at defiance ; and we cannot tell how far this tendency may 
have operated to alter the facts and tenor of his life. While 
in his answer to the messengers of John, Jesus spiritualized 
certain of these prophecies to make out their application to 
himself, the Evangelists and early Church, on the contrary, by 
ascribing to Jesus a fulfilment of them to the letter, obtained a 
confirmation of their belief in his supernatural deeds, and so 
gradually lost sight of the historical Jesus, and substituted as 
the object of their veneration, an ideal Christ of their own. 

It has been well observed by M. de Broc, that the true 
knowledge of the past enables us to explain the present, and 
serves as a warning for the future. And applying this observa- 
tion to the case before us, we may say, that if the early disciples 
of Jesus had been acquainted with the true course of the history 
of Israel, which modern criticism has approximately revealed to 
us, they would have been prepared to understand Jesus, and 
the great revolution in their thoughts and lives which he had 
effected. But having instead of such a knowledge only the 
popular and canonical view of that history, they failed to 
comprehend him, and explained him to themselves by regarding 
him as a 'living miracle, as a prodigy of the same nature as 



308 THE NATURAL HISTORY OK 

many others which embellished the national history in the past ; 
and thus it was natural, or, we may say, inevitable, that to use 
M. Arnold's expression, " The extra-belief of the Old Testament 
was transferred to the New Testament," and that the canonical 
history of the origin of Christianity became a mythical history. 
The miracles of the Old and New Testaments must stand or 
fall together. The belief in the former, which prevailed in the 
age of Jesus, goes far to explain the belief in the latter. Both 
cycles had their origin in very much the same principles. And 
there can hardly be a more uncritical proceeding, or a more 
desperate shift on the part of apologists, than to retain their 
faith in the latter while making a sacrifice of the former. Thus 
to assail parts of the orthodox system, while leaving untouched 
the basis of the system, viz., the supernatural idea, is enough to 
account for the sterility of much of the criticism of the current 
broad theology. 

A recent writer (Dr. Cairns), whose orthodox bias is too 
strong to permit of his dealing candidly with theological 
questions, has pronounced it to be " the radical difficulty in the 
heart of the mythical theory," that, " if as that theory implies, 
Jesus was a mere man, or moralist, without miracle or ray of 
divinity," he could never have so " dazzled " the disciples as to 
make them " creators of himself." From our point of view, the 
difficulty here said to be radical is only superficial or none at 
all. We have already anticipated and solved it, in showing 
that by the majesty of his character, the elevation of his life, 
the authority of his teaching, and his occasional exercise of 
moral therapeutic, Jesus impressed his disciples, while still 
among them, with a belief in his Messiahship ; and we have 
only to add, that before the mythical process properly began, 
the impression thus made was deepened by the spiritual 
grandeur of his death, which crowning event made possible 
the belief in his resurrection, and so " dazzled " the disciples 
that an ideal colouring was imparted to all their reminiscences 
of his life. 

Another apologist (Dr. Fairbairn) has objected to the 
mythical hypothesis, that it has the radical fault of making 
" the New Testament miracles echoes and imitations of those 
recorded in the Old." According to this hypothesis, he goes 
on, " Jesus was arrayed in the marvels that had been made to 
surround the prophets. What they had done, he had to do. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 309 

But to this theory, it was necessary that the miracles 
of Christ should exactly repeat and reflect those of the Old 
Testament ; a difference in character and design was failure at 
a point where to fail was fatal. And here the failure was 
complete. The miracles of the Old Testament are mainly 
punitive, but those of Christ mainly remedial. The first 
express, for the most part, a retributive spirit, but the second 
are acts of benevolence." In illustration of this criticism, 
reference is then made to the incident recorded in Luke ix. 54- 
56, where the disciples ask Jesus, after the example of Elijah, 
to call down fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans who 
would not receive him into their village. But Jesus " rebuked 
the disciples and said that he was come not to destroy men's 
lives, but to save them." As Dr. Fairbairn seems to place 
reliance on this objection, we have given his words at length. 
But it fills us with surprise that such reasoning can satisfy the 
mind of a theologian so able and so ingenious. For, obviously, 
the Christian mythicist would be careful only to make it 
appear that Jesus had performed miracles as great as the 
prophets had, or greater, with some general features it might 
be of resemblance, but necessarily of quite a different spirit and 
character, and in harmony with the new spirit of his own 
religion. Only a blundering mythicist of defective insight and 
sympathy could have done otherwise. The skilful mythicist 
who was in sympathetic touch with the gospel could only 
attribute miracles to Jesus which exhibited a marked difference 
from those of the Old Testament, and were dramatically 
consistent with the distinctive spirit of his character and teach- 
ing. Dr. Fairbairn seems to forget that the mythicizing fancy 
was a play of the Christian consciousness, and was doubtless 
guided and controlled, even if unconsciously, by a deep insight 
into the distinctive nature of the new doctrine ; an insight 
which in default of other modes of self-explication, found vent 
just through the mythicizing faculty. Indeed, the passage 
referred to in St. Luke's Gospel is probably a reflection of the 
feeling which accompanied the mythical process of the incon- 
gruity of attributing to Jesus such punitive and retributive 
miracles as are of ordinary occurrence in the Old Testament. 
At the birth of those simple but beautiful creations of the 
Christian sentiment, the sense of fitness cannot be supposed to 
have been absent. To be just to the mythical theory, we 



310 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

must suppose that the phantasy in shaping these symbolical 
narratives was instinct with the Christian spirit, and knew its 
work, even though all unconscious, it may be, like every great 
original artist, of the rule which it followed. But though the 
Christian myths could not by any possibility have been a mere 
echo or reflection of those of the Old Testament, yet there 
cannot be a doubt that they were enriched and fertilized by 
acquaintance with those mythical cycles which had been the 
growth of many ages, and were now on a sudden call made to 
yield all that they suggestively could in the service and under 
the urgency of a higher idea and a grander enthusiasm. 

The reverence in which the Old Testament was held by the 
disciples operated in two ways to colour the evangelic tradition. 
The disciples sought, on the one hand, to find in it anticipa- 
tions or forecasts of all those events of the life of Jesus of 
which the memory was preserved by the Church ; and, on the 
other, to invest him with all those attributes of the Messianic 
character which had been traced in the Old Testament ; in 
both ways, suggesting the imposing idea that the life of Jesus 
was the fulfilment of one grand divine purpose which had been 
set forth in the ancient records of Israel, or, in the language of 
the apokalypse, that " the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of 
prophecy." 

The same apologist of supernaturalism brings up yet another 
objection to the mythical theory, to which we may shortly 
advert, viz., that " it fails to explain why no miracles were 
attributed to the Baptist." To this we reply, that a sufficient 
reason may be assigned for the omission. The mythicizing 
phantasy shows a certain caprice in its choice of the events and 
persons around which it plays for which we cannot altogether 
account. But it is, at least, conceivable that John's character, 
being less winning and attractive, and his work less distinctive 
and epoch-making than that of Jesus, had also less power to 
strike the popular imagination, to awaken sympathy, and to 
encourage that loving contemplation which is the soil best 
adapted for the springing of the mythical process ; and besides 
this, we have to consider that though some of the Baptist's 
disciples seem to have remained attached to his memory and 
doctrine, yet we may believe that the finest and most impres- 
sionable spirits among them, and those who were gifted with 
the deepest religious insight, joined themselves to Jesus, and 



_ • 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIC, ION. 3 I I 

enrolled themselves among his followers. John, moreover, 
always disclaimed any title to be regarded as Messiah ; and 
when one who did advance this claim made his appearance, 
there would be no disposition to magnify John's function, but 
rather to suffer his light to be extinguished in that of one 
greater than he. The situation thus created is well defined by 
the fourth Evangelist, where he makes the Baptist say, "lie 
must increase, but I must decrease." John vanished from 
men's thoughts when Jesus began to occupy them. The reli- 
gious phantasy did not play around his person, because he was 
not an object of supreme interest to the Christian community. 

In this same connection Dr. Fairbairn, whom we take to be 
one of the most enlightened of our apologists, brings forward, 
in proof of the historical reality of the miracles ascribed to 
Jesus, what he calls their " miraculous moderation," the absence 
of all extravagance from the exercise of his supernatural gifts, 
the fact of his never being represented as using these gifts on 
his own behalf, or for hostile or defensive purposes, " his ab- 
stention from the use of his power being even more remarkable 
than his exercise of it." Now, if Jesus really was endued with 
miraculous powers and with redemptive functions, it is only 
what we had to expect, that he would exercise these powers in 
a manner consistent with his general purposes. In other 
words, the moderation referred to would hardly need to be 
accounted for, and we may freely admit that the manner in 
which Jesus is represented as exercising these powers is such as 
to raise a presumption in favour of their reality, though hardly 
so strong a presumption as Dr. Fairbairn's words seem to imply. 
But the marvel is that, supposing he did not really work 
miracles, the mythopceic fancy, in ascribing such works to him, 
should have observed these limits and proprieties. The real 
question for us is, whether, on our view, we can account for 
this moderation, this absence of extravagance in the synoptic 
myths, or for this congruity between the general conception of the 
character of Jesus and the particular deeds and sayings ascribed 
to him? And to this question the reply is, that the mythopceisi 
must be conceived of as instinct with Christian feeling— as steeped 
in Christian ideas ; one of which was that Jesus came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister ; that his death was an atone- 
ment for sin, and that he could not save others except by the 
sacrifice of himself. Here was an idea which the mythical 



312 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

fancy would carefully observe, and seek to give effect to in its 
creations — an idea which would not only elevate the mythi- 
cizing impulse, but also drive off all childish and irrelevant 
fancies, such as those of the apocryphal Gospels. The silly and 
extravagant narratives of these Gospels are mere travesties, 
suggested to vulgar minds, who were in no wise touched with 
the moral grandeur of the theme ; but to those who worthily 
appreciate them, all great ideas clothe themselves in noble and 
fitting forms of representation ; and as we peruse the simple, 
restrained, and dignified synoptic narratives, while we do not 
regard them as literally true, we cannot fail to perceive that 
they are the fancies or creations of men who entered deeply 
into the mind and purpose of Jesus — how deeply is, we think, 
apparent most of all in the highly figurative narrative of the 
Temptation in the Wilderness, which may be reckoned as one 
of the most consummate of these creations. But we need not 
do more than refer to this. 

The last objection to the mythical theory to which we shall 
here advert is drawn from the " solid realism " (to use the ex- 
pression of Dr. Bruce), i.e., the versimilitude or life-like appear- 
ance which unquestionably characterizes many or all of the 
miraculous narratives of the Gospels. This feature has been 
much commented on by apologetic theologians, and much 
importance attached to it. But it is now pretty generally 
understood to furnish a very weak evidence for the historical 
value of the miracles as a whole, as well as a very unreliable 
test for discriminating between the authentic and the doubtful 
miracles, where anything of the kind is attempted. This note 
of authenticity is impressed upon many works of pure fiction ; 
and it is felt, besides, that the loving contemplation of any 
subject whatever, whether commonplace or abnormal, confers an 
artistic power of describing it, of entering into its spirit, draw- 
ing out its details with sympathetic insight, and investing it 
with all the air of reality. In the case before us, this power 
would just exercise itself in imparting that very air of so-called 
" solid realism " to the idealistic touches and miraculous features 
which were given by popular fancy to the life of Jesus. This 
air of realism, which undoubtedly invests throughout the in- 
cidents, natural and supernatural, recorded by the synoptists, is 
reproduced in the Ammergau Mystery, where it makes a life- 
like impression on the spectators ; but there, as here, it goes 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 I .3 

but a little way in substantiating to the critical mind the 
historical value of those incidents. 

It may help to make the mythicizing process intelligible if 
we bear in mind that the early Church must have been uncon- 
sciously influenced by the desire, not merely to exalt the person 
of Christ, but also to strengthen and consolidate the credentials 
of the new faith. To the vast majority of its converts the 
Gospel probably came, not as an appeal to their spiritual 
instincts, but as a rule of life and a method of salvation 
dictated with authority by an infallible teacher ; infallible 
because believed to have been raised again from the dead by 
the power of God ; and it became necessary to confirm that 
authority, in every way that could be devised or imagined, 
against the inroads of scepticism and doubt. The marvels 
with which the life of Jesus was invested were strikingly cal- 
culated not only to enrich Christian thought, and to store the 
believer's mind with symbols and pictures of the new life in 
Christ, but also to serve as credentials of his authority, and so 
fitted to sustain believers on the heights of enthusiasm and the 
fulness of conviction. This latter was an object of pressing if 
not absolute necessity, because the early disciples must have 
felt in a peculiar degree what men have felt in all ages of 
religious exaltation, " How difficult it is to keep heights which 
the soul is competent to gain." No less truly than finely has it 
been said that " we cannot always burn with ecstasy, we cannot 
always retain the vision, and there are hours of faithlessness 
and of distrust in which we have to cling blindly to facts re- 
vealed to us in the vanished moment of inspiration " (Dowden). 
As in times of doubt, of temptation, and of despair, individuals 
sometimes fall back, as even Cromwell seems to have done, for 
strength and comfort on the moments of insight and of eleva- 
tion to which they had themselves attained in the past, so when 
they were assailed by the sneers and cavils of unbelievers, or 
haunted by misgivings from within, the early Christians would 
feel the need of refreshing and redintegrating their faith by 
recalling their memories of the life of Jesus ; and the more 
wonderful these memories were, the more would they be fitted 
to stay the wavering soul and to supply an objective founda- 
tion to a faith of which the subjects of it might at limes be 
painfully suspicious that it was subjective in its character. If 
this need of the spiritual life might not act as a stimulus to 



314 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

mythical inventiveness, we may at least conceive of it as pre- 
disposing the mind of believers to the ready acceptance of 
incidents however miraculous. In moments of great spiritual 
illumination the early disciples, with St. Paul among them, 
might be able to lay hold of the evangelical conception of 
God ; but when the illumination grew faint they must have 
felt, as we all do at this day, the need of some warrant or 
authority for that conception ; and they were in a manner 
driven to seek such authority in an exalted view of him who 
had revealed it to them. Their craving for such a warrant 
could not be satisfied until they had exalted him to an equality 
with God, and thus, no doubt, it became a motive of the 
mythopceic process, and, as we shall yet see, of the dogmatic 
process also. 

At this point we are reminded of the great diversity of 
opinion among orthodox theologians as to the relation sub- 
sisting between what are called the external and the internal 
evidences of Christianity, or as to how these two branches of 
evidence supplement and support each other. By some the 
internal evidences are regarded as quite subordinate, as satis- 
factory only from connection with the external evidences. By 
others the physical miracles, considered as credentials, are so 
much undervalued that they are spoken of as " a deadweight 
upon the gospel, making it more difficult to believe than it 
would have been without them." Between these two extremes 
an intermediate position has been suggested, viz., that miracles 
were wrought by Jesus, not to convince or convert unbelievers, 
but to remove lingering or reviving doubts from minds which 
had already responded to the inward and spiritual appeal of 
the gospel, but were fearful of being the victims of illusion, and 
desired to have some palpable guarantee of the faith before 
surrendering themselves finally and unreservedly to its control. 
A view this of the function of miracle which is at once in- 
teresting and plausible, because it takes into account the well- 
attested fact of common experience in the religious life, that 
periods of exaltation and of assured conviction are apt to be 
followed by periods of reaction, and to decline gradually and 
insensibly into a life of commonplace and doubt ; and because it 
assigns to miracles a place in the general system of religion as 
the divinely appointed remedy for this instability and fluctua- 
tion of the religious life. But to modern criticism it appears 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 I 5 

that this feeling of insecurity, this dread of illusion, this craving 

for an outward guarantee, instead of having been met by the 
actual occurrence of miracles, i.e., by a special and exceptional 
procedure of providence, was what prompted believers uncon- 
sciously to provide for themselves the desiderated confirmation 
of their faith by shaping the life of Jesus into a more and more 
miraculous form. It is, we admit, hard to conceive how in the 
early Church mythical invention could co-exist in an active 
state with the presence of doubt and misgiving, except by some 
such supposition as that of the existence within it of contrary 
currents of thought and feeling. But it is, at least, not difficult 
to understand how the craving for relief from agitating doubts 
and the dread of illusion might operate in securing an easy and 
ready welcome and reception to narratives of miraculous works, 
which were thrown into circulation by the more potent and 
affirmative forces of the spiritual life. The orthodox apologetic 
view of the relative value of the two kinds of evidence is sup- 
posed to find support in those words of Jesus in the narrative 
of the man whom he cured of palsy, " that ye may know that 
the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, 
arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house." But these 
words, instead of being spoken by Jesus, were more probably 
put into his mouth by the mythicist or the Evangelist, and 
addressed by him, as it were, " over the heads of an imaginary 
audience" to men of the Evangelist's own time. It was thereby 
suggested that if miracles for the confirmation of faith did not 
happen within the experience of the latter, they had happened, 
at least, under the ministry of Jesus, who by such means had 
satisfied for his contemporaries those very doubts which would 
be felt by men of the next and all succeeding generations. 

If we may be justified in speaking of the motives for a 
process which went on unconsciously in the Church, wc should 
be inclined to say that a principal motive which spurred on 
the mythical process was the unconscious desire to convert 
the probability of certain religious doctrines into a certainty. 
The so-called Christophanies marked the moments at which 
there suddenly rose up, for the first time in the minds of the 
disciples, the intense realization or certitude of the new life 
into which Jesus had ascended. But naturally, and by a 
common experience, these moments, as has just been pointed 
out, were succeeded by others of less lively realization ; by 



3 16 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

moments, that is, of incipient doubt and misgiving, and the 
desire to retain, or rather to recover the original feeling of 
certitude, acted as a stimulus to the pious fancy to exalt the 
work and character of Jesus, by way of strengthening the 
grounds of their faith in him. 

Apropos of this remark, we notice that in Literature and 
Dogma, Mr. Arnold says, and says truly, that " the region of 
hope and presentiment extends far beyond the region of what 
we know with certainty/' but that we may help ourselves 
in the conduct of life by taking an object of hope and pre- 
sentiment, as if it were an object of certainty, and that so long- 
as these extra-beliefs serve this purpose we may well hesitate 
to attack them. With the same " region " in his eye, Cardinal 
Newman maintains, in various passages, that the disposition to 
receive without cogent proof the objects of Christian hope and 
aspiration as if they were certain, is a test of the religious 
character and an evidence of saving faith. But " No," says 
the man of understanding, who takes reason as his highest 
guide, " no, I will retain my hopes and my aspirations, and 
derive from them what help I can in the conduct of life ; but 
receive their objects as matters of faith or certainty I shall not, 
until they verify themselves to my reason." The hopes and 
presentiments which were awakened in the first disciples of 
Jesus by their intercourse with him seemed to them to be 
verified by his resurrection. But now, when the only meaning 
which we can attach to the resurrection is the rising of Christ 
— the ideal man— in us, our hopes can only be verified by 
what we see when we look within and around us. When we 
perceive the beginnings of the life eternal in ourselves and 
others here, we may look forward with heightened confidence 
to the continuance of the same life hereafter. And it was 
perhaps from the perception of this that St. Paul (Rom. v. 4) 
could say that " experience worketh hope." 

To take these words literally, and apart from the connection 
in which they stand to St. Paul's general system of thought, 
would be uncritical. But taking them thus for the present, 
they would seem to imply that the ground of Christian hope is 
not some doctrine placed ready to hand in a creed or formula, 
which we may take for granted on authority; but something 
which grows up within us as an experience of the inner 
life : and our religion can no more be a national affair, as it was 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 317 

with the Israelites of old, nor an affair of joint subscription to 
a creed, as it is with the orthodox churches of to-day, but 
an affair of the individual life and conscience. And we can 
recognize the ideal Church only as a voluntary association for 
mutual edification and common worship of men like-minded in 
the desire and effort to cultivate the higher life, of which 
Jesus set the example. This is a view, however, which we can 
arrive at by other lines of thought, and we do not need to 
rest it upon the doubtful interpretation of words incidentally 
used by the apostle in another connection. But to leave 
this digression, we proceed to remark that the mythopceic 
process was facilitated by the close and heated atmosphere 
in. which it was carried on. All free discussion, all impartial 
or hostile criticism, was rigorously and effectually excluded 
from the Christian pale. Outside opinion was never allowed 
to penetrate within the barriers which the new faith erected 
round itself. To doubt or to hesitate was to lay oneself open 
to the charge of scepticism or indifference, and the dread of the 
entrance or encroachment of such a spirit was repressive of all 
real investigation or scrutiny of evidence. In the very in- 
telligible lack of historical allusions to such a state of things in 
the early Church, our conjecture in regard to it is warranted by 
the observation of cases of an analogous kind, and a situation 
was thus created eminently favourable to the growth of the 
myth. Even in our own day we have witnessed the rise and 
establishment of a sect in the midst of us, claiming to be 
endowed with the gift of miracles and tongues, and there is a 
strong presumption that but for the repressive vigilance of the 
more critical questioning and scientific spirit of the age, this 
sect would by this time have been appealing to a body of 
miracles and legends little short of those with which the lives of 
Jesus, and of some of the mediaeval saints, have been embellished. 
To a strong faith everything, even the impossible, is credible ; 
and we can easily conceive how, in a community which owed 
its very existence, its separate life, to the passage of a great 
wave of religious excitement, its whole mental activity, its 
whole literary inventiveness may have been fired by the one 
purpose of exalting the object of its faith. If in any case we 
cannot trace all the steps of the process, we may vet know thai 
there were tendencies and principles at work which sufficed to 
introduce mythical elements into the evangelical tradition, and 



3 i 8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that phenomena similar to those for which we contend have 
occurred in the development of other faiths besides the Chris- 
tian, such as Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Confucianism. 

Let a society in which a high and novel religion — at war 
with human passion and with established maxims and usages — 
forms the main and absorbing interest of life ; let such a 
society arise and consolidate itself amid conditions of an ap- 
parently adverse and untoward kind, and manifest a power to 
remodel and renovate the lives of its adherents. The existence 
of such a society will be a phenomenon of a character so 
exceptional and mysterious that the mythopceic fancy, which, 
as is seen in other cases, is at the service of religion, will 
inevitably be touched and quickened by it, and play around 
the circumstances, real or imaginary, of its origin, until there is 
given to them a definite and historical shape, in which the 
supernatural element will be an important factor ; and such, 
we believe, was the case in the Christian society. That a 
mythical process transformed the events connected with the 
origin of Christianity into a consecutive miraculous history 
may be paralleled, and rendered credible, not only by what has 
happened in the case of other religions, but by analogy with 
the manner in which apologists of the present day, whether 
of the orthodox or mediating school, starting from a belief in 
the inspiration or substantial historical value of Scripture, 
resort to the most hazardous and far-fetched methods and 
devices, hermeneutical and scientific, for the removal of diffi- 
culties. Just so the early Church, starting from a belief in the 
resurrection and divinity of Jesus and in his miraculous powers, 
placed no limit to its inventiveness and credulity in dealing 
with the tradition of his life. 

In addition to what has now been advanced on this part of 
the subject, we should not omit to take into consideration, that 
even during his lifetime Jesus may have been credited with 
miraculous powers — with powers which he really seemed to 
exercise in the healing of disease and in the exorcism of evil 
spirits. When, therefore, narratives got into circulation after 
his death, of miracles wrought by him that passed far beyond 
these limits, such narratives might be regarded, even by the 
disciples, who, in his company, had witnessed nothing of the 
kind, as a mere play of the devout fancy — as innocent illustra- 
tions or sensuous descriptions of those spiritual powers which 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 I 9 

they had seen him exercise, or even of miraculous powers 
which he might have exercised had he been so minded— as 
narratives accommodated to the less spiritual apprehension of 
many of the converts ; and such narratives, when not challenged 
as fictitious or unauthentic, but allowed to circulate in a spirit 
of charitable or considerate indulgence towards neophytes of 
the less spiritual sort, would at length be accepted by the 
whole Church as strictly historical. The chain of evidence 
which certified their actual occurrence would seldom, if ever, 
be examined ; it would be enough if they seemed to be true 
illustrations of the spirit of Jesus and of his mode of action ; 
or if examined, it admitted in general of being so imperfectly 
scrutinized or tested, as to leave room for a certain degree of 
doubt in the minds of those interested, and the benefit of the 
doubt would, more or less uniformly, be given in favour of the 
marvel. No one, however strong his faith, independently of 
such supplementary narratives, would feel called on to question 
their authenticity. Such narratives would be felt to be poeti- 
cally, if not literally, true ; and, while calculated to strengthen 
the faith, to give play to the emotions, to delight the imagina- 
tion, and to aid the understanding of believers, not to disparage 
the office and character of Jesus. The attempt to draw a dis- 
tinction between miracles which he did and miracles which he 
did not perform — to begin to make it a question of evidence 
rather than of faith, would, if made, have excited doubts, and 
possibly, in many cases, have extinguished enthusiasm and 
have arrested" the spread of the great movement in the midst 
of its swing ; for the state of mind which prevailed in the 
infant Church no story would seem to be absolutely false 
which tended to exalt the powers of Jesus and to brighten the 
aureole which surrounded his person. The faith which befitted 
the hour was not pragmatical but unhesitating, provided only 
the alleged facts were true to the grand and central idea. 

Without adverting to other considerations that might come 
in here, we should say, finally, that the unorganized state of 
the early Church — the absence of any central authority or 
court of appeal, and the rapid extension into foreign lands of 
a faith which, in its freshness and creative vigour, was naturally 
impatient of such authority as might, for example, be claimed 
by an apostolic congress — was also favourable to the mythicizing 
process. Anecdotes originating, no one knew where, and cir- 



320 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

culating simply by virtue of their congruity with the evangelic 
doctrine and spirit, could not be easily set aside or thrown out 
of circulation as unauthentic; no authority was anywhere lodged 
by which this might be done. The authority of the personal 
followers of Jesus, who had been witnesses of his life and con- 
versation, could extend but a little way towards effecting this 
object, even if they regarded it as an object in itself desirable. 
The ferment in the Church was too active to be stayed ; the 
new spirit in its struggle towards self-consciousness and self- 
expression was too imperious to be resisted. 

The early Christians generally having once surrendered 
themselves to the faith of the resurrection, there was no a 
priori objection to the occurrence of any miraculous work 
whatever, provided only it was in harmony with the wisdom 
and beneficence which characterized the life and mind of Jesus. 
The report of any work of which this might be predicated 
received credit as a matter of course and without examination. 
That such was the case we may see from a comparison of the 
fourth with the other three Gospels. The fourth Evangelist 
reports many works and sayings of Jesus of which, so far as 
we may judge from the synoptists, the other eye- and ear- 
witnesses knew nothing — works and sayings which it requires 
no little ingenuity to reconcile with those reported by the 
latter. But no one could venture at the time to deny that the 
apparent discrepancy might be accounted for by some such 
conjecture as that which is put forward at the present day, 
viz., that the fourth Evangelist was admitted to an intimacy of 
intercourse with Jesus, or had means and opportunities of 
observation, or a retentiveness of memory, or a receptivity for 
the highest mysteries of the faith peculiar to himself. The use 
of criticism in any proper sense of the word was in complete 
abeyance ; presumption was thought to be in favour of mira- 
culous occurrences ; the evidence for such occurrences was 
never sifted, and the sufficient reason for accepting as true 
the report of any work attributed to Jesus was, as we have 
said, its conformity or fitness to the general idea which the 
converts* had been led to form respecting his character and 
principles of action. The enthusiastic belief of the original 
disciples was enough to kindle the same belief in the minds of 
others, and to account for the propagation of the movement 
which resulted in the establishment of the Church. Consider- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 2 I 

ations such as these, which do not profess to be exhaustive of 
the subject, make it possible for us to conceive that the 
reminiscences of the life of Jesus, preserved by his personal 
followers, may, in a very brief period, have gathered accretions, 
and been rapidly moulded into that mythical form of which 
we have three revisions in the New Testament. All of these 
are very wide indeed from the life which they profess to 
depict ; and though not more truly noble and elevating in their 
appeal to human sympathies, yet, owing to the presence in 
them of the mysterious and supernatural element, more impres- 
sive to the imagination of men in whom spiritual instincts were 
but feebly developed, as were most of those whose preparatory 
discipline had been such only as the effete heathenism or the 
rigid Judaism of the age could supply. From which remark 
it will be seen, that in our opinion there may be both gain 
and loss in the identification of Christianity with a supernatural 
system of religion. The supernatural element, besides being 
attractive to many minds, is, when accepted, unquestionably 
calculated to give consecration and sanction to the moral and 
religious truths which have been garnered in Christianity, and 
to place them beyond the reach of cavil and the questioning of 
the intellect. But so far as this is an advantage, it is dearly 
purchased by a corresponding loss ; the loss, namely, of the 
prophetic spirit, of the deep personal engagement with religious 
truth ; and also the loss which it occasions by throwing the 
mind of the individual into the Judaic attitude of expectancy 
and of passive longing for some immediate divine manifesta- 
tion in the form of a secret reinforcement of the spiritual life; 
or into what must be regarded as a position of false relativity 
to God. But above all, the great disadvantage of the super- 
natural element is that it is liable, nay certain, to fall sooner or 
later into discredit ; and when that has taken place, the religion 
which is bound up with it is also apt, for a time at least. 
to share in its fall, and to lose hold of the human mind. 

The mythicizing process to which we have now drawn 
attention was carried on by the disciples, more or less uncon- 
sciously, in their endeavour to elevate their Master into a 
greatness proximate to the divine, and into a complete and 
faultless embodiment of that ideal which had been sug- 
gested to them by his life, and especially by its closing 
scenes. The tendency to do this was in their situation all 

x 



322 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

but irresistible. It has been said that " in every elevated 
soul there is a burning thirst for something more elevated 
than itself; it desires to behold its ideal in a bodily form, 
external to itself, that it may the more easily rise towards it" 
(Carlyle). This craving was powerfully active in the disciples 
of Jesus. The veneration which he had awakened in them 
knew no bounds, and in their effort to gain an adequate 
impression of his character, they naturally and inevitably fell 
into the habit of investing him in their imagination with those 
supernatural characters and powers, to his possession of which 
many incidents in his career seemed to point. 

Having thus seen how the faith of the resurrection estab- 
lished itself in the Church, and supplied an impulse to the 
mythopceic process, we must here pause to call attention 
to another faith closely connected with that other, the effect 
of which was to aid materially in the same process. We refer 
to the faith that the risen Christ would come a second time, to 
establish the kingdom of God, and to begin his personal reign 
upon the earth before the generation then living should have 
disappeared. That a belief of this nature prevailed univer- 
sally in the primitive Church is hardly less certain than that 
a belief prevailed in the resurrection of Jesus. It is even 
probable that for a time this belief was the more absorbing of 
the two, and that the apparition of Jesus to the disciples on 
the third and succeeding days was regarded chiefly as showing 
that he was already invested with the celestial form in which 
he should descend on the clouds of heaven to begin his reign. 
As time went on, however ; as that generation of believers 
disappeared one by one from the earth, and there was no sign 
of his second advent, it was, we may be sure, a source of trial 
to faith, and a sore discouragement to the Church. But the 
faith in Jesus was too deeply rooted to brook denial ; it 
survived this disappointment just as we believe that it will yet 
survive the loss of the supernatural idea which has hitherto 
been considered essential to its existence. The Church seems 
to have gradually given up the hope, and to have considered 
that the day of the Lord was deferred to an indefinite period 
(2 Thess. ii. 2). 

But what interests us here is the question as to how this 
faith in the second advent arose, and whether Jesus had given 
to his disciples any reason to entertain such an expectation. In 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 323 

his great work on The Apostolic Age, Weizsacker gives it as 
his opinion that the prediction of Jesus regarding his resurrec- 
tion cannot be received as historical, while at the same time he 
is satisfied that the promise that Jesus would come a^ain to 
erect the kingdom of God, is an essential portion of the oldest 
tradition. By which language we do not understand this author 
as intending to express the opinion that Jesus actually made 
this promise. For it would be inconsistent with the distinguish- 
ing and fundamental doctrine of Jesus respecting the spiritual 
nature of the kingdom ; and it is ever the mark and characteris- 
tic of genius, when it has laid hold of a great truth such as 
this, that it is " misled by no false fires." The intense con- 
viction that the kingdom of God was purely spiritual was what 
emboldened Jesus, the promulgator of this truth, to regard 
himself as the Messiah in the true sense of the word. And 
we may be sure that he would guard this doctrine carefully 
against misconception. To the safety and security of this 
position his inmost nature bore testimony. And had he said 
anything to imply that his kingdom was of a mixed nature, 
partly sensuous or carnal, and partly spiritual, or had he 
admitted into his teaching anything predictive in the strict 
sense of the word, he would for us no longer occupy that 
unapproachable eminence which belongs to him as a teacher 
of religion. It is true that in Matth. xvi. 27, and elsewhere, 
he is represented as using language calculated to give occasion 
to a faith of a mixed nature. But we do not regard such 
lauguage as a genuine utterance of his, any more than John i. 
5 1 , which resembles it in spirit and intention, " Verily, I say 
unto you, hereafter ye shall see heaven open and the angels of 
God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man," and 
was probably built after the manner of the fourth Evangelist, 
upon hints of the kind in the synoptists. We therefore con- 
sider this extra and temporary faith of the primitive Church to 
be a survival of the inherited Jewish idea of the kingdom 
of God which the spiritual teaching of Jesus had failed to 
correct. 

We conceive that this inherited idea asserted itself anew 
in the evangelical tradition of his teaching, in the form of a 
prediction uttered by him to encourage the belief that though 
apparently discredited for the present by the catastrophe of 
his death, it would yet be fulfilled in the experience of that 



324 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

generation. We conceive too that this faith did not arise at 
the very first along with that of the resurrection, but that 
it arose some time after that other faith in the visible appa- 
ritions of Jesus had established itself in the minds of the 
disciples. After a time, when these experiences had manifestly 
ceased, the question would inevitably arise, " Why does he 
not show himself any more ? Will he not come again to 
erect the kingdom for which we have been taught by the 
fathers to look ?" " Yes," the answer would be, " he will 
come again, not immediately, however, but within the lifetime 
of this generation. Ancient prophecy will yet be fulfilled. 
These manifestations of Jesus to a favoured few are only- 
pledges of his final coming, when every eye shall see him." 
That a faith which expressed itself thus should quickly gain 
ground under the circumstances, and establish itself in the 
minds of men who already believed in the resurrection of 
Jesus, and in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, it is easy 
to imagine. 

The prevalence of such a faith is enough to show how far 
were the personal disciples, and the early Church generally, 
from being indoctrinated by the spiritual teaching of Jesus ; 
but it was of immense temporary advantage to the Church, by 
inspiring it with the idea that the time of endurance would be 
short ; and so confirming the fidelity of its members to their 
profession. We have even reason to believe that it gave an 
ascetic tone to the Church of that time, and withdrew its 
interest almost entirely from a world which was soon to 
undergo a total change, and to pass under a different regi- 
ment. This effect still survives to some extent in Christianity, 
and, as placing it in antagonism to modern culture, has been 
made a subject of reproach to it, though, as we have already 
shown incidentally, this feature of religion receives no counten- 
ance from Jesus himself, who enjoined his disciples to give to 
Caesar the things of Caesar, and, in opposition to the Baptist, 
set the example of eating and drinking like other men. 

The important bearing which this faith in the second advent 
must have had upon the mythopceic process is quite apparent. 
For while a lively expectation of the speedy occurrence of the 
great event was yet prevalent in the Church, i.e., for the first 
generation of believers, there would be no serious or systematic 
attempt to reduce the oral tradition of the life of Jesus to 



_ 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 325 

writing, and this period of suspense would be favourable to the 
mythopoeic process, because the oral tradition would be quick 
and elastic, not stereotyped, but open to incessant revision. 
The faith, too, would prompt men to seek a justification for 
itself in words spoken by Jesus, and to interpolate his teaching 
with language which seemed to warrant the expectation of his 
second advent. There may also be something in the idea of 
Volkmar, that when through long deferment the hope of the 
second advent became faint and languid, the Church, even while 
it suffered predictions of that event to retain their place in 
tradition, would yet turn back to the earthly life of Jesus, and 
seek to invest it with a glory greater than had yet been seen in 
it, by way of compensating for the failure of hope in that other 
direction. 

There were thus, we see, various tendencies at work to 
promote the process of a mythical embellishment and meta- 
morphosis of the actual reminiscences of the life of Jesus. 
There was the tendency to exalt his character, to impart more 
and more of a miraculous aspect to his life, to represent him 
as performing marvels in no degree inferior to those recorded 
in the Old Testament, and worthy of one reputed to be greater 
than all the prophets. There was the tendency to make his 
life a mirror or reflection of the new spiritual consciousness, 
which was traceable to him ; an anticipation of that varied ex- 
perience which the Christian community had gained in its 
conflict with the hostile and unbelieving world. Before the 
Gospels were written the community had witnessed the effect 
of the new religious principle in the midst of opposing forces, 
the resistance it had met, the impression it had made, and the 
conquests it had won ; and this experience was a fund which 
could be drawn upon to enrich the life and teaching of Jesus 
with materials suitable to its character, and prophetic of the 
needs of the coming age. There was yet further a tendency 
to clothe the reflections of the Church upon its own marvellous 
history, so far as it had gone, in the form of words and dis- 
courses put by it into the mouth of Jesus ; words which were 
thus, in effect, predictive post eventum, after the manner of 
apokalyptic literature. One critic, indeed (Volkmar), has gone 
so far as to treat the Gospels not so much as a life of Jesus as 
rather a history, whose elements have been drawn chiefly from 
sources such as these. And though this is a manifest ex 



326 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

aggeration, yet there is a certain amount of truth in it, and 
much of the synoptic material (though how much cannot 
exactly be said) may be accounted for in this way. When 
we find an incident recorded in the Gospels which is vividly or 
symbolically illustrative of the situation and experience of the 
early Christians, or any saying ascribed to Jesus which they 
might have used in controversy with their Jewish countrymen, 
we may regard that incident or that saying as of doubtful or 
mythical origin : as meant to place on record an experience by 
way of preserving it for the benefit of the Church, and cal- 
culated to act upon the sceptical mind by its apparently 
apokalyptical or prophetic character. At the same time it is 
manifest that the relation in which Jesus stood to the Jews 
may have foreshadowed that of the disciples to their country- 
men ; and that he may have spoken or acted in a way which 
we can suppose them to have done, so that the speculation 
here referred to is of doubtful value. 

It goes but a little way towards explaining the legendary 
accretions of the life of Jesus to say, that that was a legend- 
loving age, and that the growth of legend was to be looked for. 
It is by no means clear to our mind that that was a peculiarly 
legend-loving age, and there is the fact that no legend grew up 
around the remarkable figure of the Baptist. Tendencies there 
were, no doubt, in that as in other ages, favourable to the 
growth of legend. But the mythical traditions of Christianity 
can be explained only by taking into account not only wants 
common to the human mind, which found satisfaction in them, 
but also pre-existing beliefs and peculiar circumstances in the 
situation of the early Christians. The impression which the 
primitive disciples received of the personality of Jesus during 
their intercourse with him was what gave the initiative, and 
caused those experiences which were interpreted as Christo- 
phanies. But it soon came to be a practical question — urgent, 
if unformulated and unexpressed — what was to compensate for 
the cessation of that intercourse ? what was to convey that im- 
pression to those who had not enjoyed that privilege, who had 
not seen and companied with him ? The impression had for 
this purpose to shape itself into language, and pass, by the 
instrumentality of words, into the general consciousness. The 
very alphabet of such a language had to be constructed. And 
no one capable of appreciating the nature of the problem thus 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 327 

presented will be disposed to underrate its difficulty. It re- 
quired the genius of a Paul, as will be immediately seen, after 
prolonged meditation in the recesses of Arabia, and after much 
experience of mission work and of the conditions of its success- 
ful prosecution, to reduce that impression to the form of dogma. 
But the Galilaean disciples applied themselves to the easier task 
of justifying that impression, and keeping it alive in their own 
minds and in the minds of their converts, by exalting the 
details of his life. Any plain, matter-of-fact report of it would 
have produced but a pale impression of the reality as it ap- 
peared to themselves ; pale in comparison with that which the 
reality had made on eye- and ear-witnesses of it. Hence the 
necessity, or expediency, to which they unconsciously yielded, 
of vivifying that impression by imparting a mystical and super- 
natural colouring to their report of it, i.e., by submitting it to 
the mythicizing process. 

The perfect and consistent beauty of the Gospel narratives 
throughout, and not least of the miraculous narratives, has been 
universally acknowledged. By many who cannot regard them 
as strictly historical, they have been regarded as productions of 
high literary genius. One great sceptic expressed the opinion 
that it is easier to conceive that the life had been lived than 
that the story of it had been invented. But it may help us 
to conceive how such narratives could have been put together, 
if we bear in mind that the outline of the record had been 
given in the life actually led by Jesus, a life which, in com- 
parison with the lives of other men, was of surpassing moral 
beauty. We may therefore apply here the observation of 
Aristotle, that it requires no extraordinary genius to fill up 
an outline with appropriate details which time reveals to us, or 
helps us to find, and so to complete the picture. The time, 
which Aristotle postulates, was an important factor for the 
filling up of that outline, because the ideal traits of the picture 
required to be suggested by the results which, on a large scale 
in the history of the Church, were in some sense a continuation 
or a " filling-up " of that individual life. The Gospel narra- 
tives were not thought out by any one mind, but were the 
growth of many minds and many years. Details were from 
time to time added to the tradition, many of which were 
not the belated records of incidents in the life of Jesus, but' 
registers of Christian experiences in the form of such incidents 



328 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

-the explanation, probably, why they have lent themselves 
in all ages of the Church so admirably to homiletic use. 

Before leaving this subject of the mythopceic process to 
which the records or reminiscences of the life of Jesus were 
subjected, we would briefly remark that though in vulgar 
estimation, and at first sight, the process may seem simply to 
pervert and falsify the history, yet in reality it is the process 
by which the past is exalted and glorified, the religious 
sentiment intensified, and feelings of awe, reverence, and 
devotion educated to a point which they might not other- 
wise attain. By the mythical transformation of its objects, 
the religious sentiment mounts from stage to stage, until at 
length it arrives at the conception of the pure Ideal or con- 
crete image of the Ideal, and can dispense with the ladder by 
which it has mounted to that height. In the religious history 
of the past it has, in many cases, been one of the great educa- 
tive processes of the world, by giving expression to the moral 
and religious aspirations, and clothing ethical ideas in forms 
sensuous but impressive, and presenting to men images of 
heroism and saintship greater than were furnished by the 
contemplation or achievements of actual life. Such has been 
the case especially in respect of Gospel history. While the 
mythopceic process, as we have pointed out, received its 
impulse from the belief in the resurrection of Jesus, its 
unconscious aim was to represent him as realizing in his person 
to the full that ideal of goodness and greatness which his 
life and resurrection had suggested to the minds of the dis- 
ciples, and no obstacle or misgiving was suffered to arrest 
the process until the Church was satisfied that this goal was 
reached ; though, as we shall yet see, after the mythicizing 
fancy, in its unconscious action, had done its best, and ex- 
hausted its resources, a further and final advance had yet 
to be made in the same direction before the Church could be 
satisfied that the idealizing transformation of the life of Jesus 
had reached its predetermined goal. This advance was made 
by the fourth Gospel. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

RELATION OF MYTH TO DOGMA. 

LET us here pause to offer a few observations, by way of 
summing up and further elucidating what has now been said 
respecting the mythical element of the Gospels, besides con- 
necting it with the prophetic thought in ancient Israel, and 
preparing the reader for the dogmatic form into which, as we 
shall yet find, the religion of Jesus settled in the Christian 
Church. 

I. We hold that neither the conception of divinity, nor the 
ideal of humanity, were ethically perfect in Israel. The teach- 
ing of Jesus was needed to supply the defects and missing 
traits in both ; and when these were supplied by his life and 
doctrine, the Church advanced to a higher ideal, and proceeded 
to conceive of it as embodied in his person. Thus may Jesus 
justly be said to have fulfilled the prophets — first by exalting 
and perfecting their ideals, and then by the illustration of these 
in himself. In this fulfilment, however, we do not see the 
evidence of a prophetic foreknowledge of events which took 
place five or six hundred years after the prophets lived ; for 
that would manifestly be a supernatural prevision. But yet, 
the correspondence between the prophetic embodiment of the 
ideal, and the general features of the life of Jesus as reported 
by the synoptists, is so close, that no sane person can regard it 
as purely accidental. We therefore explain the fulfilment to 
ourselves as due fundamentally to the evolution of that reli- 
gious idea of which Israel and the early Church were the 
organs. In its Christian stage the idea was germinant in that 
of Israel, and the latter was anticipative or prophetic of the 
former. By a stroke of the imagination, the prophets gave to 
their ideal its concrete form in the suffering servant of God, 



330 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

while the Christian mythicist read his new ideal into the his- 
toric personality of Jesus. In words which have, if we remem- 
ber, been used by some recent writer, but which, at all events, 
express the drift of our thought, " the prophets impersonated 
their ideal, while the Church idealized the person," thus between 
them completing the circle of thought. 

II. By virtue of what has been called "imaginative insight," 
like that by which Plato divined the cruel fate to which a 
perfectly good man would necessarily expose himself, the pro- 
phetic spirit in Israel may have conceived that the ideal 
Israelite, were he to appear, would have to encounter the 
murderous rancour of his countrymen, and even to suffer death 
at their hands. It would also be the crowning glory of such an 
one (compare I Pet. ii. 20) to suffer wrongfully, without im- 
patience, without resentment, and without abatement of his 
patriotism. In actual life no example of such transcendent 
virtue might be visible, but the thought of one such might be 
suggested to the idealizing mind of the prophet by the sem- 
blance of it in the spectacle of the innocent victims that were 
daily led to the altar of sacrifice in the temple. At least, it 
was certainly associated with that spectacle in the mind of 
Isaiah (liii. 7), as well as afterwards in the grandly speculative 
soul of the fourth Evangelist (John i. 29). But this prophetic 
idealization would also be associated with a thought of wider 
range. The facts of human life could not but reveal to Hebrew 
thinkers, no less than to the dramatists of Greece, the idea of 
the solidarity, for good and evil, of the family or the race. It 
was too evident to be overlooked by observant minds, that the 
sins and crimes of men were followed by sufferings on the part 
of the guilty person himself, and on the part of his kindred and 
children, however little these latter might have partaken of his 
sin. This law of the physical and moral world, affirmed in the 
Decalogue, and attributed to the decree of God (Exod. xx. 5, 6), 
entered deeply into the mind of Israel. And just as suffering, 
inclusive of the tendency to guilt, as the penalty of sin, was 
spread around, and entailed from generation to generation, 
so there was a remedial action of this same law of continuity — 
the converse of that other — which must also have engaged the 
mind of Israel. The inherited tendency to guilt did not fetter 
the will ; for a man was master of his fate, and might resist 
the tendency. An individual might put forth such a pre- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 33] 

eminent degree of moral energy, as not only to extirpate the 
inherited taint in himself, but also stem and turn back the 
advancing tide of evil. A life of such exceptional worth was 
supposed not merely to exert, by the power of sympathy, a 
natural influence on the surrounding society, but also to be of 
supererogatory value, and even to be endued with vicarious 
virtue, sufficient in the eye of God to palliate or atone for the 
sins of the society of which he was a member. For, let it be 
remarked, that though these theological terms are of com- 
paratively recent origin, yet the ideas which they express were 
not unfamiliar in Israel. They were the ideas to which Isaiah 
gave popular and dramatic expression in his delineation of the 
servant of God, and were probably taking shape in his time in 
national thought, though they had not yet assumed that de- 
finite and dogmatic form to which they afterwards rose in the 
theology of the Synagogue. (See Weber's book on this 
theology.) And these same ideas remained in force to influ- 
ence the mind of St. Paul and of the early Church ; being called 
in to explain the great revolution which flowed from the 
devoted life and death of Jesus; in which explanation, divested 
of its dogmatic element, we have to acknowledge a great 
world-historic truth, viz., that by his life and doctrine Jesus did 
weaken the forces of evil, and did introduce a new renovating 
or redemptive influence into human life. What St. Paul's 
teaching did was, as will yet appear, to represent this natural 
operation of the life and work of Jesus, under the form of a 
supernatural operation. 

III. That Jesus was a pre-eminently righteous man — an 
ideal Israelite — was the impression made upon the minds of 
those who companied with him, by his whole personality — by 
the beauty of his character, by the grandeur of his spirit, and 
by the power of his doctrine ; and his cruel death, so far from 
undeceiving them, or convincing them that they had made a 
mistake, rather confirmed that immediate impression, and 
awakened in them the further faith that God had raised him 
from the dead. Their assurance of his resurrection was so 
vivid that it may have imparted itself to many who had not 
enjoyed the privilege of immediate personal intercourse with 
him ; but when, as must often have been the case, their testi- 
mony failed to overcome the prejudice against him to which 
his ignominious death gave rise, it was supplemented and con- 



332 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

firmed by proofs drawn from the prophetic writings, that the 
servant of God, in whom the Messiah was now merged, behoved 
to die and to rise again in triumph. It has been well pointed 
out by Weizsacker, that the recourse to this supplementary 
proof for these two events — the death and resurrection of the 
Messiah — formed the beginning of Christian theology, and that 
this proof from the Old Testament was subsequently stretched 
to other incidents in the Gospel history. In the multifarious 
records, prophetic and historical, of that revered volume, it was 
easy for the strong faith of the Church to find prophetic 
allusions to many other circumstances of the life of Jesus, till 
at length, by a pious adjustment of materials, from this side 
and from that, this proof was gradually drawn as a " net " over 
the whole evangelic tradition. This process does not exactly 
cover what is meant by the mythical process, but it certainly 
took part therein; and the mention of it leads us naturally to 
the consideration of the dogmatic process, to which we now 
turn. 

Having endeavoured to show that the faiths which grew up 
after the crucifixion furnished a starting point, and an im- 
pulse to the mythicizing process, we proceed to remark that 
these same faiths gave rise also to the dogmatic process by 
which the " religion of Jesus" was converted into "the Christian 
religion." These two processes have, according to our view, a 
common source. They both spring from a tendency or habit 
of mind very intelligible in itself, but against which, in its 
various forms, all the best thought of modern times has pro- 
tested, viz., the habit or tendency to explain the facts of 
experience, common or recondite alike, in whole or in detail, 
by assumptions which transcend experience, or by the action 
of forces, to the reality of which we cannot rise from the human 
consciousness — the starting point for all real knowledge. In 
the case of the early disciples of Jesus, the experience to be 
explained may be variously described as the sudden rise 
within them of the new hope, the transformation of their reli- 
gious consciousness on the third day after the crucifixion, or 
the revival of their confidence in their crucified Master, with 
all that it involved. This great experience could for them be 
explained only by the supposition of some mysterious agency, 
or by the action of a supernatural element, which, in the 
concrete form of myth, or in the abstract form of dogma, they 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 333 

thought into their conception of the nature, life, and function 
of Jesus. The actual and rational cause of that experience 
was the new idea and the new conception which had been 
imparted by Jesus as new contents to the consciousness of his 
disciples. But this intermediate factor being overlooked, or at 
least not deemed sufficient to account for that experience, a 
mystical or supernatural cause was associated with it for that 
purpose, as will yet be seen more particularly. 

Speaking generally, the myth may be said to have elevated 
the person and the work of Jesus into a supernatural region, 
whereas the dogma was the use made of the faith thus 
generated to give to the person and work of Jesus an immediate, 
causative, or genetic relation to the great inward experience 
or revelation of the spiritual life which befel the disciples, and 
was propagated from them to their converts. But, more 
particularly, the relation between the myth and the dogma may 
be said to be one of mutual interaction. The dogma is 
implicated or involved as a presupposition in the myth. As the 
supernatural, non-rational, or magical explanation of Christian 
experience, it entered as an intrinsic, but inexplicit element 
into the mythical record of the life of Jesus, and could never, 
for any period however brief, have been wholly wanting in the 
Church ; but in its separate, explicit, and developed form, in 
which it may have reacted upon the myth, it was mainly, at 
least in its initial shape, the work or creation of St. Paul, who 
has therefore properly and deservedly been called " the first 
Christian dogmatist," and who is certainly, next to Jesus 
himself, the greatest figure in the history of the Christian 
Church. 

In addition to what has here been said regarding the relation 
in which the dogma and tradition stood to each other, there is 
the important consideration, that the dogma, like any other 
idea, had a self-evolving power, more or less independent of the 
tradition from which it took its inception, and that there would 
necessarily be a tendency in the tradition, while still fluid, to 
adjust itself to the dogma by mythical accretions as it settled 
into form. The most crucial illustration of such self-adjust- 
ment is to be found in the dating of the crucifixion, both in the 
synoptists and in the fourth Gospel. But our discussion of 
this point will be reserved for our remarks on the fourth 
Evangelist. 



334 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

And here let it be remarked, that the dogma of St. Paul can 
hardly be regarded as a pure reflexion of the doctrine of Jesus, 
inasmuch as it took its form from the introduction and presence 
of the supernatural idea, which, as we contend, was entirely 
absent from the teaching and the life of Jesus. This idea 
prevailed universally during the whole period of the New as 
well as of the Old Testament ; and necessarily imparted to the 
historical and doctrinal elements of the records a character and 
colouring which did not properly belong to them. Carrying 
out the idea of evolution, Dr. E. Caird is naturally led to regard 
as " legitimate developments," the form given to the doctrine 
of Jesus by St. Paul and the fourth Evangelist ; but even this 
view of the later form of doctrine can hardly be received 
without protest, if we keep in view, what Dr. Caird himself 
admits, 2,235, that in some of the words of Jesus, his leading 
principles, viz., that self-realization is only possible through 
self-sacrifice, and that true progress is only possible by gradual 
development, are " more clearly expressed than they ever were 
by any one down to the present century, when they have 
become the key-note of all speculation." This seems to be an 
admission that neither in Pauline nor in post-Pauline f doctrine, 
has there been any substantive development, but at most only 
a variation of the form, the infusion into it, not strictly 
legitimate, of supernatural elements ; in other words, the con- 
version of it into dogma. What development there has been, 
has been a development of the foreign and unreal supernatural 
element, brought about by the effort of faith and traditional belief 
to defend themselves against the objections of the intellect, by 
means of scholastic distinctions, not always intelligible, which 
again make new demands on faith. St. Paul did indeed retain 
in substance the doctrine of Jesus as to the religious relation, 
but he very materially changed it in form by raising it into the 
supernatural sphere, by taking Jesus out of the ordinary 
conditions of humanity, and representing him not as the 
teacher, but as the mediating instrument of that relation ; 
thus sacrificing the simplicity which we instinctively feel to be 
befitting to that relation, and giving to it a circuitousness and 
intricacy which did not belong to it as taught by Jesus. In 
our view, the forms which the doctrine of Jesus subsequently 
assumed in canonical literature, were not so much developments 
as rather conversions of the subjective form of the religious 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 33 5 

process as taught by Jesus into an objective form, so as to 
meet the exigency of an age in which the supernatural idea 
dominated the thoughts of men ; to invest the doctrine with 
extraneous authority, and to render it palpable and impressive 
to popular imagination. And here, let it not be thought, that 
in returning to the simplicity of the doctrine of Jesus, the 
Church will take a reactionary step or lose the benefit of its 
varied and manifold experiences, and of its inner conflicts in 
the long past. On the contrary, we imagine that by deliberately 
and explicitly discharging from the religious sphere, the super- 
natural idea which Jesus implicitly and undesignedly declared 
not to be essential, the Church will greatly purify and enrich 
its thought, and probably initiate a new era in its history. 

It may now occur to the reader that, up to this point, 
nothing has been said as to the presence of dogma in the great 
evolution of religious thought, which we have been tracing. 
For this apparent omission the reason is, that neither in the 
Old Testament nor in the synoptic Gospels is there such a 
thing as dogma proper, or, as it makes its appearance, as will 
immediately be seen, in the Pauline and post-Pauline epistles. 
The supernatural element of Old Testament theology appears 
in the form of myth, but does not shoot forth or blossom into 
dogma ; and the cause of this is evident. The legal view of 
the religious relation, which is predominant in the Old Testa- 
ment, does not postulate or further the dogmatic process. For 
in that view there was, or there seemed to be, nothing mys- 
terious — nothing that seemed to call for explanation. The 
legal seemed to be the natural relation between God and His 
creature, man — analogous to that which existed between man 
and man, or to that between master and servant, modified by 
the idea of the election. The legal view prevailed even in the 
Old Testament view of the forgiveness of sin ; for both sacrifice 
and repentance were only legal acts — natural means enjoined 
and sanctioned by God to propitiate His anger, and to effect 
the restoration of the sinner to His favour. Here all was plain 
and intelligible ; and the same may be said of the teaching 
of Jesus. The evangelical relation which Jesus taught was 
grounded or resident in the nature of God Himself, and was 
only the explication of his new conception of the divine char- 
acter. No propitiation was needed to bring the relation to 
good effect. Repentance itself was not a propitiatory work 



336 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

but merely the opening or turning of the mind to embrace the 
divine goodness, which was never suspended. But then, to 
men accustomed, as St. Paul had been, and as all men naturally 
are, to regard the religious relation from the legal point of view, 
the evangelical relation could not but seem to involve a great 
mystery. It was not easy for such to understand or to believe 
that God could forgive without some propitiatory service, even 
though such unconditional forgiveness was the very nerve of 
the evangelical idea. The difficulty which thus presented itself 
was got over, as will yet be shown, by representing the pro- 
pitiation as made once for all by God Himself — i.e., by an 
atonement offered by Christ, as Son of God, upon the cross. 
The dogma sprang from the endeavour to show how the new 
or evangelical relation was established and adjusted itself to 
the prior or legal relation. In the main this was accomplished 
by St. Paul, who was profoundly conscious, indeed, of the 
evangelical relation, but could not rest, as Jesus did, without 
further explanation, in the simple idea of the fatherliness of 
God. In truth, the great Apostle was only in part intellectually 
emancipated from the legal idea ; and by a stroke of genius he 
laid hold of the person of the risen Messiah, as the historical 
vehicle for giving concrete form to his compromise between 
that and the evangelical idea. What is here said enables us to 
understand why there is no demand, either in the Old Testa- 
ment or in the synoptists, for anything corresponding to faith 
in the Pauline or dogmatic acceptation, and how it is nowhere 
said, in either the one or the other, that the foolishness of God 
is wiser than men ; or that the things of God are foolishness 
to the natural man (i Cor. i. 25 ; ii. 14). Jesus, indeed, is 
represented as thanking God that He had hidden the Gospel 
mystery from the wise and prudent, but had revealed it to 
babes ; but we have pointed out elsewhere that, if these words 
are authentically reported, they bear a different meaning from 
that which favours the Pauline view. 

The propriety of styling St. Paul a dogmatist, as above, can 
only be disputed, as it has been, by attaching a limited and 
very technical signification to the term. We feel ourselves 
perfectly warranted in speaking of a Pauline dogma, and in 
regarding it as the formless, or, catachrestically speaking, as 
the raw material which the Church in all subsequent ages has 
sought to systematize, to elaborate, and more or less to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 37 

rationalize. The dogmatic element was present in the Pauline 
doctrine before it underwent any process or manipulation of 
this kind. The dogma arose in the Apostle's mind, in his 
endeavour to trace a hidden and mysterious connection between 
the new relation to God, of which he had become conscious in 
the moment of his conversion, and the death and resurrection 
of Jesus. To him it seemed as if that relation, instead of 
being founded in the nature of God and man, had been estab- 
lished historically by these events. The transference of this 
relation from the natural basis, on which it rested in the teach- 
ing of Jesus, to the historical, i.e. y supernatural basis, on which 
it was placed by St. Paul, was what gave it the dogmatic 
character. 

Before proceeding to define more particularly the unique and 
creative position occupied by St. Paul in the history of Chris- 
tian theology, we may here notice that Dr. C. Weizsacker, 
who holds a place second to none among living theologians, 
approves the suggestion that side by side with St. Paul there 
were collaborateurs, more or less independent of him in the 
creation of the dogma, such as Apollos, Barnabas, Andronicus, 
Lysias, and others ; that these men dogmatized in a more mild 
and irenical spirit than St. Paul ; especially, we suppose, in the 
anthropological and soteriological field ; that they sought to 
resolve differences between Jewish and Gentile converts ; and 
that they may have paved the way for the introduction of 
forms of worship, for which St. Paul did not provide, or for 
that catholic ceremonial which has been called a revised edition 
of the Jewish ceremonial, and which gave to Gentile Christians 
a substitute for their ancestral religious customs. This is both 
a highly probable and highly interesting speculation, inasmuch 
as it enables us to conceive that the dogmatic evolution was 
not entirely the work of one man, and that it might have 
assumed a form and system not materially different from those 
of the orthodox Church, even though Paul had never been 
converted. At the same time, it must be said, that docu- 
mentary grounds for this surmise, however probable in itself, 
are almost wholly wanting ; and we shall here speak of St. 
Paul as if his was the mind in which exclusively the dogmatic 
process took its rise and determinate direction. 

We conceive of the great Apostle as a man of imperial 
intellect and force of character, thoroughly versed in the 

Y 



338 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

thought and literature of the Jewish people, and initiated also 
to a large extent in the thought and literature of Greece ; not 
capable, indeed, of rising, like Jesus, above the influence of his 
age and training, but still one of the highest typical specimens 
of our race, who, being caught up as in a whirlwind into a state 
of rapt devotion and enthusiasm, by the vivid revelation of the 
unseen world, and the sudden disclosure to his mind of the 
solution of the great soteriological problem, for which many 
men in all ages and countries had been yearning, was seized 
with the desire to communicate, as he best could, the same 
light and fervour to the world at large. His defect as a thinker 
was, that he could not, like Jesus, distinguish between what was 
essential and what was accidental, between what was permanent 
and what was transient, in the inherited faith of Israel. What 
was new in the doctrine of Jesus he could assimilate only under 
the forms of thought which had received the consecration of 
ages ; and even when, to use his own language (i Cor. xiii. IO;, 
that which was perfect was come, he could not strip from it 
the vestment which was proper only to the imperfect form. 
His dogma, whatever else may be said of it, was, as will yet 
be seen, a compromise between the old faith and the new— a 
survival of the earlier faith, which the new faith, though at war 
with it, could not cast out from his mind. But against this 
apparent defect in St. Paul's apprehension there has to be set 
the fact that he was enabled, partly in consequence of this very 
defect, to render a great service to Christianity. For it is just 
possible that the doctrine of Jesus, in its simple, calm, and 
somewhat jejune form, could not of itself have maintained its 
place in the world, nor have supplied the generating principle 
of a renovated society. But St. Paul, by retaining in connec- 
tion with it some of the inherited forms of religious thought, at 
points where the continuity with these might otherwise have 
seemed to be broken, and by casting it into the historico- 
dogmatic form, in association with the person and life of Jesus, 
was enabled to procure for it an entrance into men's minds, 
besides rendering it level and impressive to the average or 
sensuous understanding, and giving to it that hold upon human 
sympathies and affections which it has never lost. We may 
thus say that, by a stroke of highest genius, the Apostle made 
good whatever was defective in his apprehension of the doc- 
trine of Jesus, and rendered to Christianity an important, and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 339 

for many ages an indispensable, though probably what may yet 
prove to be a temporary, or merely provisional service. 

According to what has now been said, the myth and the 
dogma may be considered as allied literary forms employed 
directly for the sensuous presentation of the Christian idea, and 
serving indirectly to furnish a sanction to the same. In the 
Old Testament both of these functions were fulfilled by the 
myth alone, while in the New Testament they are fulfilled by 
the myth and dogma conjointly. The character and prevailing 
forms of a mythical cycle are determined by the memories, the 
feelings, the usages, the genius, and ambitions of the people 
whose creation it is. In Judaea now, under what may be called 
prophetic influences, a strong ethical and religious aspiration 
was, as we have seen, superinduced upon the purely national 
and patriotic feeling. Hence the deeply religious character of 
the mythical cycle which had its origin in that country. The 
Jewish people we regard as the guardians or subjects of a great 
ethico-religious evolution, which took place among them in the 
course of their history. And it is easy to see that many 
circumstances combined to favour the growth of a mythical 
cycle as an accompaniment or by-product of that evolution. 
To refer here to but one of these, we say that the necessity 
must have been instinctively felt at every stage of that evolu- 
tion, of making secure the point attained ; that is (to use a 
rabbinical expression), of supplying a " hedge," or sanction for 
the great moral and spiritual principles which had revealed 
themselves to the highest minds of the people, but were apt to 
degenerate into mere routine or literality, if not to be set aside 
by the " corrosive action " of the sceptical intellect, or still more 
by the " sophistry of the passions." In Israel this " hedge " 
was supplied unconsciously by the mythical creation, and for 
many ages was of great practical value ; but in the end, as has 
been shown, it concentrated attention upon itself, so as to draw 
off the thoughts of the people from the spirit of the law, for 
which it should have been a " protective covering," and resulted 
in the growth of a rigid Pharisaic legalism. It has been shown 
that at the juncture, when this result had fully worked itself 
out, Jesus undertook to break down the " hedge," and to bring- 
in to view the pure idea. But the time for this great step was 
not fully ripe, and the need of a "hedge" was again felt, even 
for the new revelation, and was supplied by the Church gene- 



34-0 NATURAL HISTORY OK THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

rally in the form of the synoptic myth, and by St. Paul and 
his coadjutors in the form of the dogma which taught men to 
regard Jesus as a divine messenger whose authority could not 
be disputed, and whose death and resurrection were represented 
as factors in the great redemption. But we write with the 
conviction that, in this late age, the " hedge " of dogma and 
myth may be supposed to have served its purpose, and requires 
now to be removed once for all, that the pure idea may stand 
forth in the power of its own light, and be made to bear 
directly on the mind of man. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL. 



Next to the death and resurrection of Jesus no event, has 
exercised a more decisive or more permanent influence on the 
fortunes of the Christian Church than the conversion of St. 
Paul. We propose therefore to bestow upon it an amount of 
attention proportioned to its importance. For which purpose 
we shall have, in the first place, to consider this event in itself 
and the circumstances by which it was brought about, or which 
help to explain it. Further on we shall have to return to it 
again, in order to show how the Apostle's understanding of it 
entered as a factor into his construction of the Pauline or 
orthodox dogma ; and yet again, to show how it helps to 
explain the Apostle's antagonism to Jewish Christianity, and 
his championship of Christian liberty. 

The personal intercourse of the first disciples with Jesus had, 
as we have seen, suggested to their minds a higher ideal of 
righteousness than that of the Pharisees. Then came the glori- 
fying effect of his death, which, through the impulse given by 
it to the mythicizing process, tended to identify him with that 
ideal — to present him as its living impersonation, and helped, 
with the Messianic idea, to ally him in their minds with the 
divine nature. The feeling of this special alliance was what 
found expression in the mythical history, with its implicit dog- 
matic element. By means of this same feeling the ideas with 
which Jesus had enriched the thoughts of his disciples were 
invested with a divine sanction, as well as with a power of 
quickening their sympathies. The achievement now of St. 
Paul consisted in drawing out this vague dogmatic element into 
an explicit and definite form, and finding in it a symbol or 



342 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

sensuous representation of the abstract religious ideas of Jesus, 
at once relevant to the naive theory of the universe, which was 
seldom questioned in that or for many succeeding ages, and also 
fitted, for that reason, to bring these ideas into powerful touch 
with human life, so long as the minds of men continued to be 
dominated by that theory. Considering, then, the important 
position occupied by Paul with reference both to the evidence 
for the resurrection of Jesus, and to the genesis and develop- 
ment of the resulting dogma, it will be necessary to point out 
how he came to occupy that position, and how he contributed 
to the construction of orthodox Christianity : in other words, 
how he was converted to the new faith. 

When we reject the supernatural cause of this great turning- 
point in the Apostle's life we cannot regard it as the effect 
produced on his mind by the testimony of the original disciples 
to the resurrection of Jesus. There is no doubt, at least, that 
for a time he gave no credit to their testimony, the time, we 
mean, during which he continued to persecute them. It is con- 
ceivable, indeed, that the fortitude of the disciples and their 
martyr patience under persecution may at length have told 
upon him, and, convincing him of their sincerity, have over- 
come his disbelief. But the spectacle thus presented to him 
was not likely to operate upon a man who, like St. Paul, felt 
himself capable of a like self-devotion to his own faith. Like 
many persecutors, he was made of the stuff of which martyrs 
are made, and he may have seen no indication of a divine 
influence in the self-devotion of his victims. Further, we have 
already shown that to supplement the evidential value of their 
own testimony to the resurrection of their crucified Master, the 
primitive disciples had recourse to certain passages of the Old 
Testament which seemed to contemplate the death and resur- 
rection of the Messiah. And it is evident from I Cor. xv. 3, 4, 
that, in dealing with his hearers, St. Paul borrowed or adopted 
the same mode of persuasion. But it does not follow from 
this fact that the line of reasoning thus founded on the scrip- 
tures was the producing cause of his own conversion, any more 
than that it was what produced faith in the resurrection on the 
part of his predecessors in the gospel. The presumption is 
that he was as little touched by their appeal to the Old Testa- 
ment as by their own testimony to the resurrection. And the 
probability is, that conviction was brought home to his mind 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 343 

from quite another source, very distinct from either of these, by 
which an end was at once put to his persecuting zeal, and a 
totally new direction was impressed upon his life. It has 
appeared that the deep impression made upon the first dis- 
ciples by the personality of Jesus was what issued in their 
belief in his resurrection. But we propose to make it appear 
that in the case of St. Paul the initiative was given to faith 
by his experience or consciousness of the emancipating power 
of the doctrine of Jesus. In other words, the grand impres- 
sion was made on the original disciples by the personality of 
Jesus and not by the principle which he represented. In the 
case of St. Paul, on the other hand; it was the principle 
taught and represented by Jesus which produced the revela- 
tion in his mind, and it was only mediately, though simul- 
taneously, that the person of Jesus was glorified to his im- 
agination, and all doubt as to the Messiahship and resurrection 
was removed from his mind. These two points being once 
established to the Apostle's satisfaction, we can easily under- 
stand how his mind might be predisposed to find allusions 
to them in the Old Testament, and to disregard all critical 
objections, whether grammatical or historical, to the sound- 
ness and value of the prophetic proof, of which, as being level . 
and impressive to the average mind, he proceeded to make 
use in his great work of winning adherents to the gospel. We 
have yet, therefore, to point out what we consider to have been 
the efficient cause of St. Paul's own conversion. 

As we are not entitled to suppose that Peter and his com- 
panions were rescued from their state of despondency by the 
Christophanies of which we read in the synoptists, so we are as 
little entitled to suppose that Saul the persecutor was converted 
by a like phenomenon into Paul the Apostle and Confessor. 
It is true that St. Paul himself regarded his conversion as 
wholly supernatural — as an act of God, quite independent of 
any will or predisposition of his own ; as much so, indeed, as 
his birth (Gal. i. 15). But we are obliged to take quite a 
different view of that great turning-point in his history, were 
it for no other reason than to preserve the continuity of his 
spiritual life, and to get rid, in his case, as in the case of the 
earlier disciples, of the intrusion of a non-rational and non- 
conditioned element. His experience was yet, we believe, in 
many ways different from the experience of the earlier disciples, 



344 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

just as his mental constitution and his previous training were 
different. He tells us himself that he had been a Pharisee, i.e., 
instructed in Pharisaic doctrine, and trained under Pharisaic 
influence to the Pharisaic form of life. At the same time he 
had, at an early period, adopted a more spiritual interpretation 
of the law than was customary among these religionists. We 
may confidently infer that such was the case if we understand, 
as we are certainly entitled to do, that in the seventh chapter 
of the Epistle to the Romans he is describing or alluding to his 
own experience, not after, but before his conversion, or, we 
may rather say, before as well as after that event. What he 
there says of covetousness, and of the law in the members 
warring against the law of the mind, gives us the idea that his 
outward blamelessness, and his zeal for the law of God — in a 
word, the righteousness which he cultivated in common with 
other Pharisees, and of which he could and did boast, did not 
satisfy the demands of his own conscience. There still re- 
mained in him that restlessness of soul, that sense of an aching- 
void in the heart, that vague yearning for something unattained 
or unattainable, which is an experience familiar to men, though 
seldom acute as in him. The likelihood is that, in his deep 
earnestness, he was seeking, as many like-minded in all ages 
have done, to reach forward to a spiritual ideal, and to termin- 
ate that inward strife between the evil toward which his mind 
gravitated, and the good of which he approved. His first and 
most natural effort for this end would be to hold on to Phari- 
saic methods ; to try the effect of a more and more rigid 
observance of the law, and of the traditional and conventional 
usages of his nation. But a glimpse of the higher ideal would 
be enough at any moment to destroy his satisfaction in such a 
course, and to rouse within him that persecuting zeal which he 
himself (Phil. iii. 6) significantly conjoins with the mention of 
his legal blamelessness. In contact with the disciples whom 
he persecuted, he had, we may believe, learned enough of the 
doctrine of Jesus to recognize in it a competing method of 
righteousness, which, just because it claimed to be a better 
method than that to which he had devoted himself (Matth. v. 
20), and because it suggested that he was in the wrong way 
altogether, disturbed his peace — made him uneasy, by the 
introduction of painful doubts into his mind, and roused in 
him in revenge a spirit of intolerance. It was to give vent to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 345 

this feeling, and to show his veneration and his fidelity to the 
law of God, that he " breathed out threatening^ and slaughters " 
against those who professed to follow that other method. He 
had probably asked himself, as the young Pharisee is said to 
have asked Jesus, What more he should do to inherit the king- 
dom of God ? i.e., what thing more than he had already done ; 
what more perfect compliance with the legal requirements — a 
question which must often have pressed itself upon zealous 
Israelites, and have played an important part, as we have seen, 
in the multiplication of the legal requirements — and he may 
have persuaded himself that, to persecute and extirpate the 
followers of him who was accused of making void the law, 
besides soothing the feeling of irritation and disquietude which 
they occasioned to him, would also be a supreme proof 01 
devotion to the cause of righteousness. We imagine him to 
have been in their state of mind of whom the poet has said, 
they " thought more grace to gain if ... . they wrestled down 
Feelings their own nature strove to own." He may have fought 
hard to stifle his own better instincts, and to acquire, like other 
persecutors, a higher merit in the sight of God, by doing vio- 
lence to the more humane and charitable feelings, and by- 
turning a deaf ear to the misgivings incited in him by his 
intercourse with the disciples, and by the glimpse thus 
afforded him of a higher rule than the Pharisaic. Agitating 
and torturing doubts as to the safety and rightfulness of such 
a course could not but assail his mind, and well might the 
heavenly voice, which but gave utterance to his own feelings, say- 
to him at length, " It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." 
A conflict so lacerating to conscience, and to all the higher 
nature of a man of Paul's scrupulous integrity and loving dis- 
position, could not last. A moment came in which his passion- 
ate resolution to cling to the old religion, his obstinate hostility 
to the new broke down — a crisis in which the competing and 
better righteousness, which Jesus had taught and exemplified, 
disclosed its intrinsic superiority to his mind, placed him in an 
entirely new relation to God, and opened up to him the pros- 
pect of higher attainment, through the idea of that divine 
forgiveness which, if not entirely discarded in the Pharisaic 
doctrine, was at least inconspicuous and inoperative, crowded 
out in that complex and conventional directory of conduct. 
According to the doctrine of Jesus, forgiveness stands in no 



346 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

relation to expiation of any kind, in which sense it is wholly 
unconditional. And it was by catching a sight of this doctrine,, 
which involved an entirely new view of the religious relation, 
that Paul was converted, though, as will yet be seen, he did not 
clearly apprehend that it was so. To say, therefore, with Dr. 
Matheson ( The Spiritual Development of St. Paul), that after the 
Apostle's conversion he fled into Arabia " to win forgiveness by 
personal expiation," is as much as to say that at his conversion 
he had not received so much as an elementary idea of the evan- 
gelical doctrine, the very essence of which is that it excludes the 
idea of expiation, whether by God or by man himself. The 
revelation to the Apostle's mind of the new relation was the 
point from which his whole subsequent development naturally 
and logically proceeded ; whereas, to say, with Dr. Matheson, 
that St. Paul's development proceeded from his " vision of Christ 
in glory," is the purest supernaturalism, depriving the Apostle's 
development of a rational, i.e., a spiritual basis, and turning it 
upside down. To regard the vision of Christ in glory, in what- 
ever sense, as anything more than an accompaniment or by- 
product of the real conversion, and to trace to it the development 
of the Apostle's dogmatic and ethical views, is to throw the 
whole history into confusion. It is only by completely ignoring 
the results of critical investigation and by the lawless play of a 
tortuous ingenuity, exegetical and other, that an air of plausi- 
bility has been given to this hypothesis. To our mind, Dr. 
Matheson's eloquent volume is one of many which prove how 
little, even at this day, the spirit of modern criticism has told 
upon some of the best minds amongst us. 

To the ardent, sanguine, and consequent mind of the Apostle, 
the Christian principle, of which he caught a glimpse, could not 
remain indifferent, but must exert either a repellent or an 
attractive force, and if attractive, it could not but take entire 
possession of his soul, and become the chief determinant of his 
inner life. Moreover, as the new idea was indissolubly associ- 
ated with the person of the Crucified One, who, as was con- 
fidently reported, had been seen again by his disciples, it is 
perfectly conceivable that in the case of a man like Paul, con- 
stitutionally epileptic, or subject to some species of hysteria, the 
moral and intellectual crisis may have been accompanied by 
some vision, or apparition, or startling flash of light, which 
would be considered by him as identical with the vision to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 347 

which the sect which he persecuted was accustomed to appeal. 
In this way, the spiritual movement which, as we have seen, had 
commenced independently in Paul's mind, just as it has com- 
menced in the minds of many other men, was attracted by, or, 
we may say, taken up, or drawn into, that other movement 
with which he had been brought into close connection by his 
persecuting zeal, and against whose magnetic influence he had 
struggled with frantic violence, but in vain. For " Im Streit 
vollzieht sich derselbe Wesensaustausch, wie in der Liebe." We 
take the conversion of St. Paul to have been an exemplification 
of the strange, but not uncommon, phenomenon of a man yielding 
unconsciously, and in spite of himself, to the encroachment of 
ideas, which he endeavours and seems violently to resist. 

There can be no doubt that the great crisis in St. Paul's life, 
if not, as he himself thought, produced, was at least accompanied 
by a vision of some kind or other, and it is necessary for us to 
determine, as far as we can, the nature of the phenomenon, and 
also the place which it occupied in the genesis and development 
of orthodox Christianity. There does not appear to us to be 
any good reason for supposing that Paul ever saw " Christ in 
the flesh," that is to say, Jesus in his lifetime, so that in his 
vision there could in no respect be a recognition of the personal 
appearance of Jesus. A sense of this seems to be indicated in 
the mythical narrative of Paul's conversion in the Acts of the 
Apostles, where he is represented as requiring to ask, " Who art 
thou, Lord ? " and as receiving the reply, " I am Jesus, whom 
thou persecutest." What we do know with certainty is that 
Paul himself thought he had had a vision of the risen Jesus. 
Beyond this all is uncertain, as any one must admit who has 
looked into the subject and compared the various accounts of 
his conversion. The result of such a comparison is to convince 
us of the impossibility of determining from these accounts what 
actually took place. 

The several narratives of the incident given in the Acts of the 
Apostles (one of them by the author of the book, and the other 
two by St. Paul himself, as there reported), do not tally with each 
other, but differ considerably in various particulars, and are 
probably made up, to an indeterminable extent, of mythical 
elements. The differences in point of detail may seem to be 
very minute, and not inconsistent with substantial harmony; but 
certain it is that no two independent critics will agree as to how 



348 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the several narratives may be combined into one consistent 
history. 

In all three narratives it is said that Paul fell to the ground, while 
in one of them it is said that all the men with him also fell to the 
ground, but in the other two they are said to have remained 
standing. No mention is made of Paul's having seen any figure ; 
indeed, it seems from all the narratives as if before or in the act 
of falling he only saw a great light, and as if his prostrate atti- 
tude and the blinding light would prevent him from seeing any 
figure whatever — a view which is confirmed by the circumstance 
that the men who journeyed with him, and who are said by two 
accounts to have remained erect while Paul was prostrate, saw 
no man. In one narrative it is said that they heard the voice, 
and in another that they saw the light, but did not hear the 
voice. These are some of the discrepancies, and if we try to 
remove or reconcile these discrepancies, we may best succeed in 
doing so by supposing that the apparitors saw the light, but no 
figure in it, and that they heard a noise, which they took to be 
the sound of a voice, without being able to distinguish the words 
— a combination of circumstances which suggests the idea of a 
flash of lightning and a peal of thunder, or some other natural 
phenomenon, which, by its sudden and awe-inspiring nature, may 
have helped, in the distracted and conflicting state of Paul's 
mind, to precipitate the crisis of his life. But the more probable 
explanation of these discrepancies is that the details of the one 
historic moment of the vision were all mythical; various repre- 
sentations of an event which in itself was mysterious and 
indescribable. For not only do the several narratives differ 
apparently or materially from each other, but what is more 
important to observe is, that they do not seem to bear out the 
authentic declaration of Paul himself, that he had seen the Lord 
(i Cor. xv. 8). For in these narratives it is only said that he 
saw a dazzling, blinding light, and heard words spoken to him 
by some one, calling him by name, reproaching him for his 
persecuting conduct, and, according to one account, advising him 
of his mission to the Gentiles. It has also to be noted that, 
while different versions are given of the words uttered by the 
voice on the occasion, there is every appearance as if most or 
all of the words were supplied by a plastic imagination, seeking 
unconsciously to clothe the bare facts, whatever they may have 
been, with appropriate circumstance and colour. They may be 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 349 

regarded as the literary or dramatic interpretation which Paul 
himself, or the Church at large, or, lastly, the author of the Acts, 
put upon the divine purpose in so suddenly and marvellously 
calling him. In confirmation of this view it will be observed 
that in one of the narratives the words imputed to the voice 
give a striking description of the work to which Paul afterwards 
devoted himself, of the mission which dawned upon him, when 
he had time to reflect on his situation, and to construe the 
significance of what had befallen him. They might be an after- 
thought, put either by himself or by the annalist into an appro- 
priate form of words, such as genuine feeling or a clear 
intelligence seldom fails to suggest, expressive of that concep- 
tion of his mission, which afterwards unfolded itself to his mind, 
as marked out for him by the divine power which had called 
and converted him, and dramatically represented as spoken to 
him in the very moment of crisis. 

Or, again, the words said to have been heard and uttered by 
St. Paul on the occasion may be explained by the reflex action 
of Paul's mind at the moment — an action which might affect 
the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight. Here all 
is conjecture, and we do not pretend to decide between these two 
views. Whoever, indeed, seeks carefully to take all the data 
into consideration, and to reflect upon them, will hesitate to 
pronounce an opinion very definitely or very oracularly upon 
the subject. But these narratives taken by themselves, and 
still more when taken in conjunction with Paul's own authentic 
declaration, that Christ had been seen by him, along with his 
description of the vision as a revelation of Christ in him 
(Gal. i. 16), make the impression upon our minds that the whole 
phenomenon was subjective, and happened to himself exclu- 
sively ; that the figure which he saw, or thought he saw, was an 
unsubstantial fabric, a painting of the mind's eye ; and that the 
words which he is said to have heard, if heard at all, were heard 
by the inward ear. 

One thing we may regard as conclusively settled, viz., that 
Paul's conversion was sudden and abrupt only in appearance— 
the natural sequel or issue of a process which had been going 
on in his mind, possibly from a time anterior to his acquaintance 
with the life and doctrine of Jesus. The probability is, that his 
intercourse with the disciples, however unfriendly on his part, 
had rendered acute that vague unrest, those unsatisfied longings, 



350 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that sense of self-dissatisfaction which his zeal for the law had 
failed to soothe or to compose. The glimpse he derived from 
them of the higher form of righteousness disturbed his Pharisaic 
self-complacency, and introduced torturing doubts into his mind. 
To suppress these doubts and misgivings he resorted, as already 
said, to persecution of the followers of the new faith, which 
shook his confidence in the old faith; and offered himself as an 
eager, though reluctant and compulsory, instrument to carry out 
the behests of the Sanhedrim. 

But a method, which appears to have been successful in the 
case of many religionists, like Queen Isabella, Maria Theresa, 
and Madame De Maintenon, failed in his case to silence his mis- 
givings and to restore his mental composure. We suppose that 
the victorious elation of the disciples in the midst of persecution 
only exasperated that conflict by which his soul was torn and 
distracted, and it was the painful consciousness of this fact 
which clothed itself in those remarkable words of the voice 
which he heard with the inward, if not with the outward ear, 
" It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks." Hard, indeed, 
it must have been to a man of his sensitive and religious mind. 
In defying and resisting those inward remonstrances he could 
not but dread that he was fighting against God, a dread which 
we know from various notices in the Acts of the Apostles was 
not uncommon at that time of spiritual convulsion. A fine 
feeling of the situation in which St. Paul was placed may have 
suggested to the mythicist or the annalist the dramatic articula- 
tion of the voice. But we are disposed, on psychological grounds, 
to believe that the above words may have been audible to the 
inward ear of the persecutor in the very moment of crisis; that 
they rose within him as the expression of a feeling which, up to 
that moment, he had striven to keep down, but which now 
broke through his power of self-control, and came upon him as 
if given utterance to by a voice from without. 

Not the least remarkable circumstance connected with the 
conversion of Paul is the fact, implied not only in the Acts of 
the Apostles but also in his Epistles, that he felt himself from 
the first called to be an Apostle to the Gentiles. This fact has 
been thought by many theologians, and among others by Baur 
apparently, to add much to the marvellous character of his conver- 
sion. The comprehension of the Gentiles in the kingdom of God 
was an idea so remote from all his previous modes of thought, so 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 35 I 

little indicated even in the teaching of Jesus, and so distasteful to 
those who preceded the Apostle in the gospel, that his faith in it, 
which seems to have been almost simultaneous with his conver- 
sion, has been looked upon as inexplicable, except on the 
supposition of a mysterious communication of it to his mind. 
Yet, if we consider it well, we shall perceive that even this faith 
was no abrupt or unmediated bound of thought. We cannot 
suppose that it broke away from all his previous experience, or 
stood in no continuity with his past way of thinking. To show 
that this was not the case, Weizsacker advances the hypothesis, 
that, even previous to his conversion, the Apostle had been 
much occupied with the hope of the general gathering of the 
Gentiles into the Jewish fold, that his persecuting zeal was pro- 
voked by the idea that the rise of the Christian sect and its 
spread into the adjoining provinces was calculated to frustrate 
or defer this great object of Jewish hope, and that, on the 
instant of his conversion, the new faith disclosed itself to him as 
the true means of converting and gathering in the heathen 
world. Now, it may be, that some such hope, encouraged by- 
prophetic hints, may have been entertained by Philo, and other 
earnest and aspiring spirits among the Jews of the dispersion. 
But theirs was not the hope of St. Paul ; they looked simply 
for an extension of the Jewish rite. But the hypothesis is, 
that St. Paul turned from Judaism to' the Christian doctrine, 
because the latter seemed to open the prospect of a universal 
religion, in which the distinction between Jew and Gentile 
should have no place. He perceived in Christian doctrine some 
element, the absence of which in Judaism blocked the way to 
its universal diffusion. And it is to his perception of this 
element that we have to ascribe both his conversion, and his 
recognition of the universalistic tendencies of the new doctrine. 
In other words, we take his universalism to be a necessary 
deduction from the element, his perception of which was the 
immediate cause of his conversion. And we have to inquire 
what that element was. 

Before his conversion he no doubt felt, in common with all 
the Pharisaic opponents of Jesus, that the new doctrine was 
calculated to " destroy the law," to " change the customs " 
delivered by Moses to the people, to annul Jewish privilege, ami 
so to place all the nations of the earth on the same level of 
religious equality in the sight of God. This feeling was what. 



35 2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

constituted " the offence of the cross " to the Jewish mind 
(Gal. v. 11), and was the very nerve of Jewish and Pharisaic 
opposition to the infant church. For a man educated and 
indoctrinated as the Apostle had been, it was at once a religious 
and a patriotic feeling, and served, in a great measure, to 
palliate his persecuting zeal, and to justify him in saying that 
he had acted in ignorance. But in becoming a follower of 
Jesus, he must have been sensible that he could only be true to 
the faith by accepting its consequences, logical as well as penal ; 
and it is only what we should expect from his thorough-going 
character and sanguine temperament, that after his conversion 
he should labour with all his might to give prominence to the 
anti-Judaic universalistic aspect of Christianity, i.e., to that very 
aspect of it which had previously embittered his antipathy, and 
that he should recognize the apostleship to the Gentiles as the 
mission to which he was specially called. The same effect was 
not produced by the new faith on the minds of Peter and the 
earlier disciples, because in them the exclusive and Pharisaic 
spirit had not been so intensified, as it was in the case of Paul, 
by his training in the schools. They did not feel as he did the 
irreconcilable antagonism between Pharisaism and the spirit of 
Jesus; and the resultant form of their religion was a sort of com- 
promise or amalgamation between the old and the new spirit. 
But with Paul there could here be no compromise. The 
Pharisaic, or specially Jewish and exclusive spirit, was com- 
pletely broken in him by his conversion, and forced to give way 
to that of universalism, which was perceived by his clear intelli- 
gence to be the direct consequence or corollary of the doctrine 
of Jesus. 

There is then a probability that the grandeur of this thought 
of universalism, or of the equality of men without distinction of 
race in the sight of God, which was seen by St. Paul to flow 
from the doctrine of Jesus, was one of the determining causes 
of his conversion. This grand idea may have flashed upon 
his mind suddenly in the very crisis of his fate, and may have 
inspired him with the consciousness of his mission. Certainly 
no greater thought than this has ever inspired the soul of man ; 
nor could Paul himself better indicate the significance of his 
conversion than by speaking of it as a call or summons, 
addressed to him by Christ in person, to devote himself to the 
ministry of the Gentiles. The fact that he was, or believed 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 353 

himself to be, the sole depositary of this grand truth, imposed 
upon him the personal obligation to proclaim it to the world, 
and he could say, as he afterwards said, " Woe is me if I preach 
not (this) Gospel." The necessity thus imposed upon him was 
analogous to that to which Jesus himself bowed with awful joy 
in undertaking the Messianic role. 

Yet it were a great mistake to suppose, as some have done, 
that the universalistic tendency of Christianity was a new char- 
acter stamped upon it by the genius of Paul, and that had he 
not been converted to the faith, and had he not delivered his 
contribution to its development, Christianity might have settled 
down into a modified form of Judaism. This tendency, though, 
for reasons already glanced at, not emphasized or insisted on 
by Jesus himself, was evidently germinant from the first in his 
doctrine, and sooner or later the discovery was sure to be made 
by his disciples, that it was the very nature of his religion to 
burst the swaddling bands of Judaism in order to unfold its 
true character, and to enter upon a world-wide career of its 
own. Apart altogether from the reasoning of Paul upon the 
subject which, though laboured, is not always lucid, or as level 
to the modern mind as it may have been to the ancient Jewish 
mind, it must soon have become apparent that the central prin- 
ciples of Jesus involved the universalistic idea. Accordingly, if 
we may here trust to the evidence of the Acts of the Apostles, 
St. Paul's views were to some extent anticipated and given 
expression to by the proto-martyr Stephen, at whose death 
Paul was a consenting spectator, and whose dying testimony 
even may have reached his ears, and have helped, with other 
things, to direct his attention to this feature of the new religion. 
Many years ago it was pointed out for the first time by Dr. F. 
Baur, the great critic, whose investigation of the history of the 
early Church formed an epoch in the historico-theological 
domain, that Stephen was in this respect a precursor of St. Paul. 
The universalistic tendency was, indeed, an element so essential 
and intrinsic to the religion of Jesus, that only the veil of Jewish 
prejudice, not taken away even from his immediate disciples, 
could for a time have obscured it ; but it could not possibly have 
remained a secret to the more liberalized and open-minded Jews 
and Hellenists among its converts, to say nothing of its converts 
among the heathen. We are disposed to regard the account of 
St. Stephen, and the report of his speech, as a genuine fragment 

z 



3 54 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

of apostolic history, just because it contains a pre-Pauline, yet 
not very distinct or explicit testimony to the intrinsic univer- 
salism of the religion of Jesus. It seems to show what we 
might naturally expect — that the thought to which St. Paul 
gave clear expression had previously dawned darkly in the 
minds of still earlier disciples, because it lay in the very nature 
of the new doctrine. But thus much may be conceded to the 
honour of St. Paul, that his dialectical genius peculiarly quali- 
fied him to establish and to make plain to popular apprehension 
the anti-Judaic and universalistic aspect of the Christian doctrine, 
as well as to engage in the minutiae of a discussion or contro- 
versy, which was not suited to the authoritative and peremptory 
tone with which Jesus directly addressed the religious instincts 
of his hearers. 

The rise of the universalistic idea in the Christian community 
has been accounted for by saying that " the time had come 
when the human spirit was to make this momentous advance," 
that universalism was " the goal to which the history of the 
world had been tending for centuries," and that the universalism 
of Christianity " necessarily pre-supposes the universalism of 
the Roman Empire, and could never have become part of the 
general consciousness of the nations, had not political univer- 
salism prepared the way for it." In spite, however, of the great 
authority with which these propositions are advanced, and the 
general acceptance which they have met, we regard them as 
specimens of a sort of generalization in which the philosophy 
of history delights, but which must be received with much 
qualification. It is very doubtful whether the union of the 
Roman Empire was ever, as Dr. Baur says, " a bond of mental 
sympathy," or whether the different races of men could ever 
have been drawn together by any political movements what- 
ever. It is the religious sentiment in its pure and spiritual 
form, as it exists in Christianity, that could alone have had 
force to bring the universalistic idea into full light. In the 
political sphere it is the selfish and ambitious principles of our 
nature which seek to force on a factitious universalism, which is 
really particularism ; whereas it is the principle of true humanity, 
as set forth in Christianity, that tends towards a real universal- 
ism. The distinction and glory of Christianity is, that it sub- 
stituted a true and practicable universalism of freedom for the 
unreal universalism of slavery, which Assyrian, Persian, Greek, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 35 5 

and Roman genius in succession had blindly and fruitlessly 
striven to impose on the world ; and it was through the influ- 
ence of Christianity that the idea arose amid the ruins of these 
empires ; for there can be no doubt that the world-historical 
character and destiny of its religion was divined by the Church 
at a very early period, giving to its confessors and martyrs 
the feeling that they, and not their persecutors, were the true 
conquerors, and bracing them for the agonizing effort which 
was requisite for laying the foundation of a universal empire of 
the Spirit. The universalism of Christianity was grounded on 
the great principle of the Fatherhood of God, or, let us say, 
the brotherhood of man. That of the Roman Empire was 
grounded on no principle whatever : it was the mere outcome 
of party struggles and of political exigencies. Merivale says 
that the Romans " unconsciously formed their subjects into one 
nation." But the idea of universalism was an element of the 
Christian consciousness from the very first. And finally, " the 
bond of mental sympathy " among the Romans was not only 
weak at the best, but neither embraced all ranks within the 
Empire, nor any people beyond its limits. In the Christian 
Church, on the other hand, that " bond " embraced the whole 
human family without distinction, and was a mighty engine for 
the conversion of the world. The political and religious ideas 
were, in short, so little akin, that the one could scarcely have 
" prepared the way " for the other. 

If, then, it be asked to whom the credit must be assigned 
of starting the idea of universalism, we reply that it belongs to 
Jesus, seeing that the idea is intrinsic to his doctrine. The 
miraculous element may be disjoined from Christianity, as we 
are now endeavouring to show, but the universalistic element 
is so constituent of Christianity as not to admit of being dis- 
sociated from it. In proclaiming the Fatherhood of God and 
the inwardness of righteousness, Jesus, without having to say 
so, laid the foundation of a universal religion. The fact that 
he regarded himself as the Messiah, and several of his sayings 
placed on record by the synoptists, may seem indeed to give 
some countenance to the allegation that he did not clearly 
realize or anticipate the universalistic range and tendency of 
his reforming efforts ; and, by way of showing that Paul 
rather than Jesus was the author of all that was new and 
distinctive in our religion, this allegation has been eagerly 



356 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

made use of by many of the modern assailants of Christianity. 
Of these assailants (outside the ranks of the materialists) the 
most recent and most radical is E. von Hartmann. But, 
strangely enough, Dr. B. Weiss, one of the ablest and most 
recent of modern apologists, has adopted the view that " Jesus 
was not fully aware of the universalistic tendency of his own 
teaching and action . . . and that the Christian religion, 
while intrinsically fitted and destined to become a world-wide 
faith, nevertheless took its rise in the mind of a man who 
deemed himself merely the Messiah of Israel, having it for 
his vocation to set up in the holy land the theocratic kingdom 
of Hebrew prophecy, embracing among its citizens all men of 
Jewish birth, and as many from the Gentiles as were willing to 
become proselytes." 

The fact that Dr. Weiss has espoused this view may 
probably have weighed with E. von Hartmann in pronouncing 
his analysis of the doctrine of Jesus to be the best which has 
come under his notice. At all events it is a point on which 
he has the distinguished apologist on his side. But, in spite 
of the assailant and the apologist, we hold it to be utterly 
incredible that Jesus could have been unconscious of the uni- 
versalistic drift and tendency of his doctrine. Dr. Bruce, 
whose description of Dr. Weiss' position we have quoted, says 
well {Miraculous Element, etc., p. 331), that the doctrines of 
Jesus, viz., the doctrine of God as the heavenly Father, and the 
doctrine of man as made in the image of God, "are the funda- 
mental truths of a universal religion"; and "who can believe 
that the man who could discover these two fundamental truths, 
and perceive that they were fundamental, could not also under- 
stand their implications and consequences, especially one so 
obvious as that of religious universalism ? " It may be said, 
indeed, that the man who first discovers and states a principle 
may not, and perhaps never does, perceive the remoter conse- 
quences which it involves. But it should be borne in mind 
that the doctrine of Jesus related exclusively to that which is 
universal and highest in man ; that so far as can be seen from 
the synoptists, he exhibited by his conduct and practice a 
marked disregard and disrespect for those particularistic rites 
and forms, and for that claim to descent from Abraham, the 
friend of God, which differentiated the Jews from all other 
people ; and finally, that so far as his teaching was specially 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. ]'^y 

addressed to his countrymen, it was polemical and antithetic ; 
but that so far as this polemical character was absent from it, 
his teaching might be taken to heart by all men, without 
distinction. We may, therefore, infer that in his view his 
Jewish countrymen were merged in the one common mass of 
humanity so far as religion was concerned. The universalistic, 
or, let us call it, the levelling character of his doctrine lay too 
near, too much on the surface, to be overlooked by him. The 
fact that St. Paul perceived the universalistic bearing of the 
doctrine so instantaneously on his conversion, inclines us to 
believe that this aspect of it could not have escaped the 
observation of him from whom the apostle derived it. The 
strength of Jewish prejudice, and the vanity of Jewish assump- 
tion, from which Jesus was free, were what blinded the Jewish 
Christians generally to the universalistic character of the new 
religion. And though Jesus did not, like Paul, give promin- 
ence and emphasis to this aspect of it, we may yet confidently 
regard it as an integral part of his system of thought ; for, as 
Prof. Butcher, speaking of Aristotle, says {Some Aspects of the 
Greek Genius^ p. 235), "It is not unfair in dealing with so 
coherent a thinker, to credit him with seeing the obvious con- 
clusions which flow from his principles, even though he has not . 
formally stated them." It is upon such general considerations as 
these, rather than upon any doubtful appeal to particular 
expressions and incidents in the synoptists, that we rely to 
show that Jesus could not have been unconscious of the 
universalism of his doctrine. 

But while we firmly regard the reasoning of Dr. Bruce on 
this subject as conclusive, we dissent from him when he pro- 
ceeds, by way of confirming his judgment, to ask, " How could 
Jesus have had insight into these (fundamental) truths unless 
he had first had a vision of the kingdom of God, not confined 
to one land or nation, but cosmopolitan in character, opening 
its gates to all on equal terms." This question implies an 
inversion of the true order of the thought of Jesus. For, if 
the idea of a universal kingdom of God came /rj/ (i.e. before 
the other two fundamental ideas to which Dr. Bruce refers 
within the sphere of the mental vision of Jesus, we must ask 
whence Jesus could derive the idea of such a kingdom, which 
evidently lies beyond the range of immediate consciousness. 
Few apologetic theologians at the present day will venture to 



358 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

say that he derived it from special or supernatural inspiration, 
were it for no other reason than that to say so would make all 
previous development of that idea in Israel of no account. As 
little could he have derived it from the prophetic scriptures of 
the Old Testament, in which, with many utterances indicative 
of a tendency towards universalism (which, however, did not 
go beyond the standpoint of the Jewish Christians of a later 
age), the kingdom of God was essentially particularistic: the 
enlargement, in a purified form, of the Jewish state. Failing 
this derivation, we should be thrown upon the hypothesis of 
Dr. Baur, that the religious universalism of Jesus presupposed, 
or was in some way derived from the political universalism of 
the Empire; in which case we should still have to inquire 
whence the idea of the divine fatherhood had been derived, 
to which the political universalism can hardly be said to bring 
us any nearer. But, in truth, the effect of this view of Dr. 
Bruce is, as already said, to invert and derange the genetic 
order of the thought of Jesus. Dr. Bruce seems here to have 
inadvertently fallen into a mistake similar to that which 
Carlyle corrects in his Latter Day Pamphlets : "Not because 
heaven existed did men know good and evil ... it was 
because men felt the difference between good and evil that 
heaven and hell first came to exist." The difference between 
good and evil is perceived directly by the human consciousness, 
whereas the notions of heaven and hell are derivative. So we 
may suppose that Jesus obtained his view of righteousness 
directly from his consciousness, and all that he said concerning 
the kingdom of God came from that and after that, and pro- 
bably contained little or nothing beyond that. 

The nascent, but halting universalism, which is, undoubtedly, 
discernible in the prophets of Israel, was coincident with, and 
inseparable from their ethicizing of the conception of Jehovah. 
And we cannot help thinking that with his more advanced 
ethicizing of the same conception a fully developed and un- 
qualified universalism could not have been strange to the mind 
of Jesus. We have endeavoured to show in a previous portion 
of this discussion that the insight of Jesus into the spiritual 
nature of man's true righteousness was what led up to his 
vision of the divine fatherhood, stripped of the particularism 
and exclusiveness which attached to it in the Old Testament, 
and both together revealed to him the kingdom of God open to 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3 59 

all men as men, "apart from all external accessories," and 
"without distinction of race, customs, or religious forms of any 
kind." This we believe to have been the true order of his 
thought, so far as we may speak of a succession where the 
consciousness of all may have been simultaneous. 

We say, therefore, that the idea of the all-embracing king- 
dom of God must have come upon Jesus, not first, but as a 
consequence of those others: a consequence so plainly and 
intimately connected with those others that he could not 
possibly have been unaware of the connection: a consequence 
so plain and intimate indeed that he might, without anxiety, 
and calmly, leave it with much else to disclose itself, as self- 
evident to the minds of his disciples. The doctrine of Jesus 
could not possibly have been confined within the narrow 
limits of Jewish exclusiveness. The new wine could not but 
burst the old bottles. The universalism of St. Paul flowed 
directly from the spiritual form of religion of which Jesus 
was the discoverer. The reserve or hesitation apparent in 
the synoptic language of Jesus, as afterwards in the conduct 
of the chief apostles, and in the attitude of Jewish Christians 
generally, may have been due to the imperfect intelligence 
or sympathy of his personal followers who reported his words. . 
It disappears entirely in the language of St. Paul, as where 
he says (Rom. iii. 29), " Is He the God of the Jews only? 
Is He not also of the Gentiles ? Yes, of the Gentiles also." 
To the Jews pertained, as the Apostle elsewhere says, the 
adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the 
service of God, the promises, the fathers, and the Christ. But 
not all these advantages together gave to them any exclusive 
or preferential claim to consider Him as their God. The 
universalism to which St. Paul thus gave emphatic utterance 
became, in the hands of the fourth Evangelist, one of the 
items or factors in a new revision of the life and teaching of 
Jesus. And it may be added, before passing from this sub- 
ject, that an idea of such general human and philosophical 
interest could not be confined to the Christian community, 
but would find its way into the intellectual atmosphere and 
be caught up by thinkers like Seneca and Juvenal, and so 
pass, in a modified form, into the common thought of the 
age, which had, indeed, to some extent, been prepared for its 
reception by the teaching of the Stoics. 



360 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Having thus endeavoured to explain that call to the apostle- 
ship of the Gentiles which St. Paul thought he had received 
at the moment of his conversion, and its bearing on the 
universalism of Christianity, we now return to the more par- 
ticular consideration of that great crisis of his life. In reality, 
it was the result of the impression made upon his mind by 
what he had learned of the doctrine, life, and death of Jesus, 
from common report, or from the victims of his persecuting 
zeal. He himself declares, no doubt, that he received his 
knowledge of the gospel and his call to the apostleship, not 
from man, but by direct revelation from Jesus Christ. But 
we can easily understand how that should be his view of the 
matter. His intercourse with the disciples being of a hostile 
controversial kind, and his knowledge of their opinions being 
fragmentary and disjointed, he could hardly view these as 
the channels of the truth to his mind ; and the instantaneousness 
with which the scattered hints arranged themselves into one 
connected view of the religious relation, and brought a sense 
of deliverance to his mind, could hardly but present itself to 
his imagination as a supernatural experience. For, a super- 
natural character is imparted to any sudden revolution in the 
religious sphere, or indeed, to any phenomenon whatever, if 
we lose out of sight or are unable to supply some link in 
the chain of natural causation. But to us no link seems 
wanting to account for the crisis in Paul's life. We conceive 
of it as being preceded by a period, however short, of oscilla- 
tion in his mind between sympathy and antipathy towards 
that new view of the religious relation which had come to 
his knowledge by hints and snatches in his contact with the 
disciples. And it set in at the moment at which the attrac- 
tion, exerted upon him by those scattered hints, overcame or 
counterbalanced the repulsion or offence which they occasioned 
to his Jewish prejudices as being a death-blow to his view of 
Jewish privilege, and to the Pharisaic ideals which had given 
the bent to his mind. 

In mental conflict with the new doctrine, he succumbed 
to its power, he was infected by its spirit. Up to this event- 
ful moment he had given no credit to the testimony of the 
disciples respecting the resurrection. Indeed, the claims of 
Jesus to be the Messiah were so much discredited by his igno- 
minious death that no amount of testimony would have satis- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 36 I 

fied the Apostle that Jesus had been raised from the dead, 
at least by a divine power. Not even the martyr-spirit of 
the witnesses, impressive as it was, sufficed to satisfy him of 
that ; for probably he was even then of the opinion which 
he expressed at a later period, that a man might give his 
body to be burned without being a friend of God, and without 
giving thereby a proof of the truth of his testimony. He may 
even have been conscious that he could himself have witnessed 
unto death for the traditions of the fathers to which the 
alleged death of the Messiah seemed to be at variance. But 
his disbelief of the resurrection was dissipated by his sudden 
and independent perception of the unique grandeur of the 
life and death of Jesus, and of the perfect beauty of his teach- 
ing, as well as of its complete adaptation to the deepest needs 
and aspirations of his own soul. The vision, or phenomenon, 
which was the main content of his consciousness at the decisive 
moment, was a merely collateral result or by-effect, depending 
on his exceptional mental or physical idiosyncrasy. It was 
the form which the crisis or turning-point in his life assumed, 
or in which it asserted itself to his own consciousness — the 
channel into which it was directed by the current report, that 
the great teacher and martyr had risen again from the dead . 
and showed himself openly to his disciples. And without 
anticipating too far what has yet to be said, we may here 
observe, that the indubitable occurrence of this startling 
phenomenon to St. Paul may have helped to confirm and 
to disseminate the belief already current in the previous 
apparitions, though, according to our theory, these were not 
really of the nature of visual manifestations, but only the 
popular explanation of the sudden and otherwise inexplicable 
dispersion of the cloud which had overcast the minds of the 
disciples at the crucifixion. 

The distinction which we draw between the experience (the 
alleged visions) of the primitive disciples and that of St. Paul, 
seems to us to be not unwarranted. Our supposition is, that 
there was no vision of any kind in the case of the former, 
partly because there is no evidence that any of them were con- 
stitutionally subject to ecstatic or hysterical conditions. Such 
evidence as may be cited to prove that the)' were (as, for 
example, in the case of Peter, Acts x.) is either irrelevant or 
not reliable. Mental changes, however great, had no tendency, 



362 TH?: NATURAL HISTORY OF 

so far as we know, to excite the reflex action of their mental 
eye, or to conjure up visionary shapes or sounds to their bodily 
senses. But from Paul himself we learn that he was subject or 
predisposed to such conditions. In 2nd Corinthians, chap, xii., 
he tells us of visions and revelations which he had received ; of 
one occasion on which he seemed to himself to be caught up 
into heaven, to hear unspeakable words which it was not lawful 
for a man to utter, and not to know whether, when this took 
place, he was in the body or out of the body ; and, if we may- 
trust what is reported of him in the Acts of the Apostles, he 
there speaks of having been in a trance, or ecstasy, in Jeru- 
salem — from which, and other notices, we get the impression 
that such states were not infrequent with him. That a man 
now liable to such peculiar states of mind should, in the great- 
est crisis of his life, in the moment of undergoing a sudden and 
complete revolution of his whole system of thought, while the 
report was flying that the author of the new thought had been 
seen alive after his martyr death, have had a vision similar to 
those of which he had heard so much, is what we should almost 
be prepared for. It was a phenomenon of the same, or of a 
like species with others that befel him on other occasions, and 
therefore not unlikely to occur under such extraordinary cir- 
cumstances. The words of the Apostle (2 Cor. xii.) in describ- 
ing his peculiar experiences are very remarkable. They seem 
to indicate that he thought it possible that the spirit of a man 
might separate itself from his body, and have a vision for itself 
apart from his bodily senses. According to the same notion, 
he might think it possible that Jesus could present himself to 
the spiritual perception, or to the senses of the disciples, without 
the intervention of an actual body. For aught the Apostle 
could tell or know, Jesus might have risen again, and have 
manifested himself without being in the body. That is to say, 
the manifestation might have a reality to the spirit which it 
had not for the bodily sense, and it almost seems as if the 
Apostle was himself doubtful as to the nature of these mani- 
festations, and as to whether they were in any sense objective. 
No doubt it is the intention of the synoptists and the writer of 
the " Acts " to represent them as objective, but it by no means 
follows that Paul himself was confident of this. Of one thing- 
only was he absolutely certain, viz., that there had been a 
manifestation of some kind to him of the risen Christ, and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. $6$ 

such as to leave no doubt on his own mind as to the fact of 
the resurrection. Even if we put aside his description of the 
event as a revelation of the Son of God in him (Gal. i. 1 6), the 
secret doubt in his mind as to the nature of the manifestation 
seems to crop up, or to betray itself in those words of his just 
referred to, " Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot 
tell, God knoweth." This doubt he may have surmounted or 
got rid of by his incongruous conception of " a spiritual body " 
— a relic of a phase of thought with reference to the connection 
between body and spirit which we of the present day have 
outgrown. 

It has been contended that Paul himself was conscious of a 
distinction between the vision which accompanied his conver- 
sion and his other kindred experiences, and that he considered 
the former to be of a more objective character than his trances 
and ecstasies. But the fact that the former was probably the 
first of the kind which he had experienced, that it had occurred 
at the most critical and decisive moment of his life, and had 
thus made a more vivid impression upon his mind, and com- 
pletely swept away for the moment every vestige of waking 
consciousness, or rather every effort at introspection, is enough 
to account for the distinction which he may have drawn ; but 
it is a distinction to which we can attach no value, and which 
we cannot regard as either warranted by the facts, or authen- 
ticated by the judgment of the Apostle. 

It is indeed very difficult, if not impossible, to pronounce 
what was the Apostle's own view as to the nature of his vision. 
There is much in his language to give countenance to the idea 
that he conceived of it as having been addressed to the spiritual 
senses only, and not to the corporeal. But this, again, is ren- 
dered doubtful if we take into account that in I Cor. xv. he 
enumerates six instances as an exhaustive list of these occur- 
rences. A sudden, merely spiritual revelation of Christ was a 
common, not to say universal experience of the early converts, 
and something of the kind is a frequent experience even to 
this day. And if the Apostle conceived that no more was 
meant by the six Christophanies, it is hard to understand why 
he should have enumerated them at all, or have thought them 
worthy of being singled out as pre-eminently demonstrative of 
the resurrection. 

Admitting, then, as beyond question, that Paul's conversion 



364 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

was accompanied by a vision of some sort, as a by-product, 
we now go on to say, that this fact invalidates, to some extent, 
his testimony, of which so much has been made by the apolo- 
gists of orthodoxy, as to the other five Christophanies which 
he enumerates in 1 Cor. xv. We cannot, indeed, set aside his 
testimony as to the remarkable nature of the experiences of 
the earlier disciples, but we do not feel bound to believe that 
these experiences were, as he seems to have supposed, in the 
form of a vision such as that which befel himself, or were 
accompanied by such a vision. It was doubtless natural, or 
inevitable, that he should be of this opinion. The language 
which the earlier disciples made use of to explain the process or 
phenomenon by which they had recovered their faith in Christ, 
to make it intelligible to the popular mind, was necessarily 
figurative, but was understood literally by those whom they 
addressed, and by frequent repetition may have lost its figura- 
tive character, even for themselves ; or, if it could never alto- 
gether have lost its figurative character for them, yet, being 
firmly persuaded of the substantial truth and supreme import- 
ance of that which they sought to communicate, they might 
feel it to be inopportune and ill-advised to betray hesitation as 
to the mode of expressing it, lest to others doubts mighc be 
suggested as to its reality. In one way or another, the 
figurative language employed must have reacted powerfully 
upon the view which men took of the occurrence. 

The great mental experience now which had befallen the 
twelve attendants of Jesus and the five hundred Galilaeans would 
be reported to St. Paul in its figurative and sensuous clothing, 
and acting upon his highly strung and peculiar mental 
organization, it would, as we have already said, contribute, 
along with the new religious ideas derived from the dis- 
ciples with whom he came in contact, to conjure up an 
apparition in his own case which he would necessarily, and 
as a matter of course, regard as of the same nature as that 
which was said to have been seen by the original followers 
of Jesus. Nor was he likely to discover that this was a 
hasty conclusion. For, when, three years after his conversion, 
he went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, it is by no means 
likely that the conference of the two men would turn upon 
the nature of their experiences. St. Paul's mind would be 
prepossessed with the idea that the experience of Peter and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 365 

his companions had been the same with his own, and he 
would feel no curiosity upon the subject, nor think of scrutiniz- 
ing the details. On the other hand, Peter had by this time, 
we presume, accepted the sensuous representation of that 
experience in place of the real explanation ; or, for the sake 
of convenience, he had adopted the figurative mode of describ- 
ing it, and would naturally suppose that St. Paul in any 
allusion which he might make to a vision, might only be 
referring to a similar experience and employing that figura- 
tive style of expression which seemed to come naturally to 
all who spoke of that crisis of the spiritual life. St. Peter 
might thus, no less than St. Paul, be preoccupied by the 
idea that the experience of both had been the same, and 
might never think of coming to any understanding upon 
the real facts. At a later period, when St. Paul's relations 
and intercourse with those who were " of reputation " had 
become of a less cordial and confidential kind, he was still 
less likely in conference with them to be dispossessed of his 
preconception as to the nature of their experience. Meeting 
with an imperious, ardent convert, like Paul, who stood on 
his own independent basis in virtue of a private and separate 
revelation, and was possessed with the idea of a vision all 
his own, it is possible that even Peter when he conversed 
with this enfcmt terrible might be carried away by his en- 
thusiasm, and regard the account of his vision as confirm atory 
of that popular notion of the experiences of the earlier dis- 
ciples w r hich had floated into currency by their own mode 
of reporting them. These various considerations help us to 
understand how St. Paul could place the purely spiritual 
experiences of the earlier disciples in the same category with 
his own, though they were materially different. 

We can see, therefore, how the fact that Paul had, or 
believed that he had had, an actual vision of his own, by 
disposing him to receive without inquiry the reports con- 
cerning the visions of the earlier disciples, might impair the 
value of his testimony to the truth of these reports. 

In reflecting upon this difficult subject we should bear in 
mind, that under the hands of men, who, like Peter and Paul, 
had undergone that great spiritual revolution, the difference 
between a visible and a spiritual manifestation of the risen 
Christ was apt to disappear. 



366 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

To simple-minded men like St Peter and his companions, 
unaccustomed to analyze their sensations, or carefully to draw 
the line between the outer and the inner world, that revolu- 
tion might appear to be a self-presentation of Jesus to their 
spiritual sense, even though " their eyes were holden," that 
they did not actually see him, and even though it was only 
by the " burning of their hearts within them," and by the 
opening and enlargement of their understanding to the new 
faith, that they had perceived any trace of his presence (Luke 
xxiv. 1 6, 32). This inner experience was of itself a proof 
to them that he had been present in some mysterious way, 
and had really appeared to them, though, at the moment 
they wist not of it. Some such manifestation of the glorified 
Christ was the only intelligible explanation of the sudden 
inrush of the new faith, and seemed to warrant them in 
affirming, or at least not rashly denying, that Jesus had 
appeared to them. Were they to express doubts as to the 
nature of the manifestation, it might, to the minds of their 
converts, suggest doubts as already said, respecting the reality 
of the fact itself, which in the main was " most surely believed " 
or fully established among them, and seemed to constitute 
the indispensable foundation of that new life into which they 
had been born. To inquire too curiously into the nature of 
the manifestation might even appear to them to argue a 
trifling, if not a profane and captious spirit. In what specific 
sense the avenue by which the revelation had come to them 
was divine, was an inquiry not for a moment of perfect faith, 
but for a time like the present in which faith has to adjust 
itself to the scientific theory of the universe. 

Let us pause here to emphasize the spiritual crisis which 
took place in the experience of St. Paul, as distinct from that 
which took place in that of the twelve and the five hundred 
Galilaeans. In these latter it was a purely mental phenomenon, a 
sudden evolution of thought ; a revival, and, therefore, more 
than a revival of the deep impression which, during his lifetime, 
Jesus had made on their sympathies and religious instincts : 
we say it was more than that, because it shot out into a con- 
viction that his life was immortal, that though put to death in 
the flesh he had risen into a higher sphere, and was alive again 
in the spirit. In the case of St. Paul, the crisis involved other 
elements. It consisted primarily in the revelation to his mind 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 36/ 

of the truth of the new or evangelical form of the religious 
relation which Jesus had taught, and involved in it a belief 
in the currently reported resurrection of him who had revealed 
that relation. It was also accompanied in his case by some- 
thing of the nature of a vision, of the reality of which, whether 
as a presentation to the outer or the inner sense, he had the 
most entire conviction. This conviction of his did not, indeed, 
originate a belief that the earlier disciples had had a similar 
experience ; but it may have confirmed the belief, which had 
already taken root, to that effect, and have put the merely 
subjective or mental nature of that experience quite out of 
sight, and perhaps out of the memory even of those who had 
been the subjects of it. 



CHAPTER XV. 

HIS DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT BY THE DEATH OF JESUS. 

We now proceed to consider St. Paul's dogmatic construction 
of the religious relation, founded on the teaching, death, and 
resurrection of Jesus. And as the subject in itself is complex 
and involved, we crave the reader's indulgence for whatever 
prolixity or other defect he may observe in our treatment of 
it. We go back to the point which we have already touched 
upon, viz., that though by upbringing, profession, and conviction 
a Pharisee, yet there are indications in St. Paul's epistles that 
even before his conversion a new synthesis of religion had 
begun to declare itself in his mind. Whether it was from 
native bent and instinct, or from the study of Judaeo-prophetic 
or Hellenic literature, or from the stimulus imparted to his 
thoughts by hints and rumours of the doctrine of Jesus, against 
whose subtle influence he could not bar his mind, even by 
placing himself in deadly antagonism to it, he seems to have 
differed from most of the Pharisaic name, by aiming at inward 
conformity to the divine law, and by a more spiritual, compre- 
hensive, and exacting view of the range of its requirements. 
He speaks of the bann which the law had pronounced against 
covetousness as having laid hold of him, and impressed him 
with a conviction of sin to which he had otherwise been a 
stranger (Rom. vii. 7). And proceeding from this point he 
seems to have gained an ideal of humanity, a conception of 
the law and its requirements, more spiritual than was contained 
in the Pharisaic system. It is also quite clear that that mental 
conflict between the ideal and the real had begun in him, 
which, if not absolutely unknown to the Pharisee, or, indeed, 
to any human being, could not, by anything contained in his 



NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 369 

system of thought, be brought to a satisfactory issue. Phari- 
saism, in fact, was a system for evading or obviating that 
conflict. 

The ceremonialism to which the Pharisees devoted them- 
selves ; their minute and scrupulous attention to law in its 
external aspect, which had no immediate ethical significance, 
offered a salve to the conscience. To a multitude of what may 
be called casuistical regulations they ascribed, as coming from 
the fathers, a divine authority not inferior to that of the 
Decalogue ; thus practically making the law of no effect by 
crowding out its moral requirements. Their religious life 
moved in a routine of symbolical and statutory transactions, 
which formed no part of the actual business of religion. A 
system of this kind, which had no contact with the inner life, 
no relation to everyday matters, and no tendency to make men 
better, could not possibly satisfy a greatly earnest, thoughtful 
man like Paul, and it needed, as we have said, but a slight 
touch or impact from without to shake its hold over his mind ; 
and that touch was given at the critical moment. True, the 
habit of reverence, which is characteristic of the religious tone 
of mind, the sanctity of inherited beliefs, and his native loyalty 
of heart, did not suffer him easily to renounce his association 
with the religious party in which he had been trained and 
educated. The struggle in his mind between the old which 
was waning and the new which was dawning was no doubt 
severe. The former had the sanction of the fathers and of the 
accredited teachers of the day; and the new, while as yet the 
character and life of Jesus had only a sort of fascination for him 
which he felt himself bound to resist, had no other sanction 
than that of his own moral and religious instincts. The 
patriotic and exclusive Jewish feeling, which was strong in 
Paul, threw all its weight upon one side; but the conflict was 
decided in favour of the other side by the pressing urgency, by 
the felt need of a personal and individual righteousness higher 
and better than the Pharisaic form of it, which had hitherto 
been his aim. After repeated, and perhaps long continued 
failure, it broke upon Paul's mind that his efforts to establish 
such a righteousness were vain, and that the only thing which 
could save him from throwing up the effort in despair, and 
deliver him from the deep-felt schism of his nature, was that 
new conception of God, and that conviction of divine forgive- 

2 A 



370 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

ness, to which Jesus had given prominence in his teaching. 
This conclusion was, we may be sure, the outcome of much 
inward debate ; and just because, under the influence of in- 
herited ideas, he struggled long against it, would it, at length, 
all the more suddenly and violently break upon his mind as 
a revelation from without, and form a crisis, an abrupt revolu- 
tion, a new starting point for his whole subsequent life. 

Our explanation, then, of the Apostle's conversion is that it 
was occasioned by the moral and spiritual ideas introduced into 
his mind by contact and intercourse, though of a hostile kind, 
with the little band of men whom he persecuted. The very 
fierceness with which he strove against the spread of these 
ideas was a sign that they were gaining hold of him ; it was 
but the effort to arrest their growing mastery over himself, 
which he could only regard as a treason and a betrayal of 
all he had hitherto held sacred. This was the true secret of 
that hatred, akin to dread, with which he regarded these ideas. 
But he did not view it in that light, he did not perceive at 
the time that his mind was yielding to the influence of those 
very ideas ; or that an involuntary, elemental, and forlorn 
struggle, of which the issue was foregone, was going on within 
him against the power of ideas which appealed to his higher 
reason ; and he regarded it only as the working of his own 
deadly exasperation against the doctrine and person of Jesus. 
The crisis, therefore, when it did come, seemed to come 
abruptly and in despite of himself, as if it were a break in 
the continuity of his inner life, so that, when he reflected upon 
it, he could not but attribute the revolution in his feelings to 
extraneous intervention, to the vision or apparition which was 
only the by-effect or accompaniment of the crisis. 

It will be seen that the explanation now given of the con- 
version of Paul differs widely from that given by T. H. Green, 
(vol. in.). This writer considers that crisis in the life of Paul 
to have been brought about by the brooding of his mind on 
the death of one who was said to have been the Messiah, and 
to have risen again from the dead. The testimony of the 
disciples had not persuaded him of the fact of the resurrection, 
but a process of what can only be called imaginative, if not 
fanciful and abstract reasoning on the hypothesis that the 
resurrection was a fact had converted him to that belief. Mr. 
Green says, " The conception of a crucified Messiah .... 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 37 I 

bearing the curse and penalty of the law," was felt by the 
Apostle to be "just what he wanted " to deliver him from the 
consciousness of being under the curse of the law. His sense 
of this was a proof to the Apostle that Jesus was the Messiah, 
and that he had risen again from the dead. But this explana- 
tion seems to us to be too abstract, too complex and indirect 
for the occasion. Some such hypothetical reasoning might 
seem satisfactory to the Apostle after his conversion, but could 
hardly be the cause of his conversion. And it appears to us 
that the facts require the more simple and direct explanation 
which we have given, viz., that when the Apostle was engaged 
in persecuting the disciples, entering their houses and haling 
them to prison, he would question them as to their faith, and 
could not but gather some knowledge of the doctrine of Jesus. 
A few hints, however straggling, broken, and fragmentary, 
would suffice to disclose to his nimble and penetrating spirit 
that what Jesus taught was a new view of the religious relation ; 
and this, at the conjuncture at which his feeling of the tyranny 
exercised over him by the Jewish or legal view of that relation 
had " come to a head," was just " what he wanted." The new 
or evangelical view of that relation, as distinct from or opposed 
to the legal view of it, recommended itself to his mind by its 
own intrinsic authority ; by its adaptation to his inmost needs ; 
by its instantaneous power of emancipating his soul from its 
internal conflict, and healing the inward schism. It had a 
verity of its own, independent of Messianic doctrine and Jewish 
preconceptions. It revealed itself to him as the true hope of 
man, by no hypothetical or doubtful chain of reasoning, but 
simply by its revolutionary effect upon his entire inner state; 
and it satisfied him, that he who had revealed it could be none 
other than the great messenger of God of whom the prophets 
had written. 

When speaking of the doctrine of Jesus, we pointed out that 
it was his discovery of the evangelic view of the religious 
relation which satisfied him, that he himself, as the discoverer 
of that relation, was the promised Messiah. And our position 
now is that St. Paul, conscious of having derived this view, 
however mediately and indirectly, from Jesus, was satisfied 
that his claim to be the Messiah was well founded. The 
moment of Paul's conversion was just the moment at which, 
after much inward debate and misgiving, the evangelic view 



3/2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

as taught by Jesus took absolute possession of his mind. As 
by a flash of inward light, he recognized the immense import 
of that new relation which formed the core of that teaching. 
The doctrine was so novel, so revolutionary in the religious 
sphere, of such startling range and gravity, and of such bene- 
ficent consequence to himself, that he readily believed all that 
the disciples alleged of the resurrection of him who had 
revealed it. 

While the conflict still raged in his bosom between the 
two principles " so counter and so keen," it would seem to 
the vivid and excited imagination of the Apostle as if the 
conflict lay between himself and a personal enemy, between 
himself as the faithful champion of the traditions of the 
fathers, and that other whom he identified with the new 
ideas which were seething and asserting themselves within 
him. This personal and ghostly character which the conflict 
assumed to his imagination is not only made probable by 
many historical analogies, but also indicated by the words 
which shaped themselves out to Paul's imagination from the 
midst of the light which was above that of the sun at noon- 
day : " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? " In the 
moment of crisis, when the new ideas gained the upper hand, 
it would appear to him as if Jesus had wrestled and pre- 
vailed, and cast him to the ground. The light, the fall, and 
the voice were but the form into which his sense of mental 
illumination and of subjugation by one who was stronger 
than he had thrown itself. And when he afterwards re- 
flected on that wonderful experience, it would seem to him 
as if the struggle which had gone on within him had been 
brought to an issue by an act of self-manifestation on the 
part of Jesus, by an act of condescension to him personally, 
if not on his own account, yet to him as a chosen instrument 
to transmit " the benefit " to others (Gal. i. 1 6). And yet 
further, it is easy to conceive that the relief at length ex- 
perienced in his conscience, the pacification of his inner life 
by the termination of the struggle, or by his going over to 
the new ideas, would ever after be associated in his mind with 
the person of Jesus, who had taken the extraordinary step 
of stooping from heaven to bring it about, i.e., to overcome 
that opposition to himself in the Apostle's mind which had 
otherwise been insuperable, and that the Apostle would ever 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 373 

after strive to repay this great and distinguishing act of con- 
descension by magnifying the significance of the person and 
office of Jesus in connection with the idea of that new relation 
which was thenceforth to be the fulcrum of his spiritual 
life. 

But, however persuaded the Apostle may have been that 
Jesus was the Messiah, a great difficulty must from the first 
have presented itself to his mind. The question could not 
but press itself, or be pressed upon him by those to whom 
he sought to impart his own faith, why it was that one who 
was the Messiah, the fore-ordained, long predicted, long ex- 
pected messenger of God, whom alone of the race God had 
deemed worthy of being raised from the dead, should have 
been subjected to a death so cruel, to a fate so ignominious. 
For if, as has been recently asserted by students of rabbinical 
literature, the idea of a suffering Messiah was not quite strange 
or distasteful to the Jews of that age, yet the idea of his 
suffering a death so ignominious as that of the cross must 
have been peculiarly offensive and incredible. It is easy to 
conceive that even if, as an abstract idea, that of a suffering 
Messiah might not be disgusting to the Jewish mind; yet the 
concrete presentation of such an idea in the person of Jesus, 
who at once disappointed current Messianic expectation, and 
made himself otherwise obnoxious by his doctrine, would be 
sure to excite only contempt and unbelief. 

Had St. Paul and the other early preachers of the gospel 
had no more to say in apologetic explanation of the death 
of Jesus than that it was a proof of his loyalty to the great 
and fruitful views which he propounded in his lifetime ; that 
he had brought it upon himself because he would not with- 
hold his testimony to the truth, but elected to brave a cruel 
death in his effort to make that truth common property, and 
to leave it as his legacy to the world, his contribution to the 
elements of human welfare, for the guidance and elevation 
of human life ; it is very doubtful indeed whether such an 
explanation would have been satisfactory to the men of that 
generation whatever we of the present day may think of it. 

The early disciples must have felt that both for themselves 
and for their converts some other, some further explanation 
was necessary. And it appears as if such explanation was 
not immediately forthcoming. For, from the first discourses 



374 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of the apostles recorded in the Acts it seems as if they were at 
some loss to say in what light the crucifixion should be re- 
garded ; as if they hesitated and could not at first make up 
their minds as to the construction to be put upon it. They 
speak as if it were a momentary triumph of wickedness, an 
event not accidental indeed, because determined beforehand in 
the divine counsels, but accomplished unwittingly by the hands 
of men (Acts ii. 23, iv. 28) ; an explanation which is evidently 
no explanation, because the same thing may be predicated of 
any wicked deed whatever, and therefore did not assign to this 
any distinctive character. The crucifixion was in fact a sort of 
puzzle to the disciples, which, however, did not shake their 
faith in him as the Messiah, and in the truth of his doctrine 
and the reality of his resurrection. On the contrary, their 
faith assumed the interim form of a belief that the offence of 
the cross would soon be removed by the reappearance of their 
Master in glorious state to the discomfiture and confusion of 
his enemies. 

But we can see from the Epistles of St. Paul that long 
before the interim faith expired, the crucifixion came to be 
regarded as the very end for which the Messiah had come 
into the world ; as a death, not in the common order of nature, 
but of a wholly abnormal character, ordained indeed of God, 
and inflicted by the instrumentality and malice of men, but 
yet voluntary on the part of the sufferer, and expiatory of the 
sins of others in fulfilment of a grand redemptive purpose on 
the part of God. 

The question therefore remains to be answered, how this 
view of the death of Jesus on the cross came to be adopted ; 
how it suggested itself to the mind of Paul and the other 
disciples. His great spiritual deliverance from the bonds of 
superstition and of legal thraldom had been brought about, 
as we believe, by the sudden alteration in his view of the 
religious relation ; but even if he himself was conscious that 
this revolution in his views had something to do with his con- 
version, it yet did not satisfy him as a complete explanation 
of that great crisis in his life. For if the doctrine of Jesus, by 
being conveyed to his knowledge, had sufficed to produce this 
crisis, there would seem to be no necessity for his death on the 
cross ; the idea that he had died as a martyr to seal the truth 
of his doctrine being one at that time of little or no weight. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 375 

That event could therefore only be regarded by the Apostle 
as a great mystery — " a mystery of godliness " — by which a 
great divine purpose was effected ; and what could that be, 
but to render an atonement for the sins of men ? The impulse 
in the Apostle's mind to exalt the person and office of Jesus 
naturally found furtherance and gave welcome to such a con- 
struction. Regarded in this light, the crucifixion seemed to 
supply a complete and satisfactory explanation of that newly- 
discovered relation, not as immanent and aboriginal, or founded 
in the nature of things, but as supernaturally effected by its 
means ; and the suggestion of atonement in connection with 
that event was not unlikely to occur to the mind of St. Paul, 
or of any other person familiar with the idea of sacrifice and 
of atonement by the shedding of blood. And this process of 
thought, however complex and far from obvious it may seem 
to us, might pass swiftly in the Apostle's mind, and make there 
an indelible impression. 

To consider Jesus as not merely revealing the placable char- 
acter of God, but as offering an atoning sacrifice, and, by the 
shedding of his blood, purchasing the forgiveness of sin, and 
the gift of a new spirit, seemed to exalt his function, and to 
make human obligation to him more palpable and personal. 
And it is easy to see that these two views respecting his func- 
tion, though very different, might easily pass into each other — 
the less palpable into the more palpable idea ; which latter was 
not only more easily expressed, but was approved and recom- 
mended both to the Jewish and Gentile mind by the analogous, 
and to them familiar and inherited idea of animal sacrifice, 
and others of a cognate nature. 

Profoundly sensible of his obligation to Jesus, the Apostle 
yet mistook the nature of that obligation. He conceived of 
Jesus, not as the originator of a great idea, but as the generator 
of a dynamic force in the life of man, as the source of a 
daemonic rather than of a moral influence in the souls of 
believers. No doubt the power of the idea in the first age 
of the Church was such as might seem to warrant the view 
that the force which he exercised was dynamic. But the 
dogma in which St. Paul explicated this view was the cause 
of that collision with science, in which to this day Christianity 
is involved. Against this great drawback, however, we have 
to place the consideration that the Apostle's inferiority to Jesus 



376 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

as a thinker was what constituted his excellence as a teacher 
for his own time. His converts shared in his own incapacity to 
receive the truth in its free and absolute form, and the shape 
which it took in his mind recommended itself to them. This 
dogma has retained its sway to the present day among 
Christians, because it is the anthropomorphic equivalent of a 
pure truth which appeals to the heart and reason of men. 

As to the relation subsisting between the doctrine of Jesus 
and that of St. Paul, our position may be briefly stated. The 
experience of the latter, which ended in his conversion, began 
with that same spiritual conception of the law to which we 
traced the development in the mind of Jesus. Both he and 
Jesus rose to the idea of the new religious relation by the same 
avenue, but with a difference which is not to be overlooked. 
(i) The experience of Paul was not self-evolved, but helped 
and brought on by the doctrine of Jesus, which was the 
exponent of an experience which in him was original. (2) 
The experience of Paul was accompanied by a state of mind, 
of which, from first to last, we see not a trace in Jesus, viz., 
a state of ecstasy, the very nature of which was that he lost 
the consciousness of what was passing within him. So that (3) 
the Apostle could only explain to himself what had passed by 
assuming that a power outside of himself and above himself 
had transformed his life and thought ; that the new relation 
into which he had been transplanted, was due to some work of 
Jesus, which, according to Jewish ideas, could be nothing else 
than an atonement effected by his death on the cross. What 
had really happened in the moment of that translation was 
that the idea of the evangelic relation, as taught by Jesus, had 
suddenly appealed, or verified itself, to his consciousness by 
putting an end to that otherwise interminable conflict which 
had hitherto waged within him. One way or another, the 
Apostle was aware of his dependence on Jesus, but, as just 
said, he mistook or exaggerated the nature of his dependence, 
and explained his whole experience as the effect of an atone- 
ment, or, speaking generally, as " the pouring in of a life from 
outside." 

The difference between the doctrine of Jesus and the 
doctrine of Paul is gross and palpable, so much so indeed 
that of late years it has been averred by distinguished theo- 
logians, among whom may be mentioned Holsten on the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 377 

continent, and T. H. Green in this country, that the doctrine 
of Paul was not derived from that of Jesus. What gives some 
countenance to this proposition is, that in the Epistles of Paul 
there is, with the exception of what he says of the Lord's 
Supper, an utter absence of any reference to the teaching of 
Jesus and the incidents of his life. From which fact the 
inference has been drawn that St. Paul was " ignorant of the 
life of Jesus prior to his death, as detailed in the synoptic 
Gospels," and that his doctrine was only the interpretation 
which he put upon the death and resurrection of the Messiah. 
But as, by the time that the Apostle wrote his great Epistles, 
he had conversed with the earlier apostles, and no doubt with 
many of the first disciples, there is, to say the least, a huge 
unlikelihood that he could have remained ignorant of the 
leading events of the life of Jesus. It is hardly conceivable 
that he should not have taken care to inform himself as to 
the earthly life and teaching of one whom he adored as the 
Lord from heaven. His omission to do so would argue a 
state of mind so incurious and indifferent as to be unnatural 
and incomprehensible. That he never refers in his Epistles to 
the teaching of Jesus may be explained by the fact that in the 
death and resurrection of Jesus he saw a compendious illustra- 
tion or symbol of the entire soteriological method as taught by 
Jesus, beyond which, in writing to believers who were pre- 
sumably acquainted with the events of the earthly life of 
Jesus, he did not need to go. And we are led to the con- 
clusion that the dogma of St. Paul«is neither more nor less 
than the doctrine of Jesus as seen through a refracting medium, 
or as deflected by contact in the mind of the Apostle with the 
facts of his death and resurrection. It may even be' said that 
by his claim to be the Messiah, and by his submission to death, 
Jesus himself, unconsciously and unintentionally, gave occasion 
to this deflection of his doctrine. 

The conjecture may also be hazarded that St. Paul's silence 
with regard to events of the earthly life of Jesus was owing in 
some measure to the fact that there was little for him to say, 
and that little needed to be said upon the subject. The course 
of that life was probably diversified by few salient details ; and 
the doctrine, though pregnant and suggestive in the highest 
degree, was so simple as to admit of being summed up by the 
Apostle in his word of the cross and his doctrine of divine 



378 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

grace. We conceive of Jesus as going up and down, preaching 
the same simple doctrine, and impressing it powerfully on the 
crowds by the solemnity of his bearing and by his manifest 
sincerity and devotion, and, finally, by the pathos of his death. 
Variety was given to the tradition of his life by the mythicizing 
tendency of men who stood at a greater distance from him, and 
who sought to draw out and to explicate into dramatic effects 
the singleness of impression which its main features had made 
upon their minds. 

Admitting to the fullest extent the difference between the 
dogma of St. Paul and the doctrine of Jesus, we none the less 
maintain the genetic relation in which the latter stands to the 
former. The most noticeable feature in the teaching of Jesus 
was the omission in it of all reference to the doctrine, at that 
time universal, of atonement or propitiation. This meant that, 
as far as he knew, these ideas did not enter into the religious 
relation. He did not feel that they were necessary to constitute 
that relation. He did not indeed repudiate or wage a polemic 
against them. He only ignored them or allowed them to drop 
out of sight. His doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood dispensed 
with them, or threw them so far into the background as 
virtually to set them aside. Placability was represented by 
him as of the very essence of the divine nature. God was ever 
ready, in spite of provocation, to welcome and countenance the 
faintest efforts on the part of the sinner to reconcile himself to 
God, to forget and cancel all his arrears of guilt. There might 
be a burden or penalty Snaking repentance hard and difficult 
to the sinner himself; but they did not alienate the good-will 
of God, or dispose Him to avert His countenance from the 
penitent. ' This was the grand truth, the revelation of which 
to the mind of Paul resulted in his conversion. Up to that 
moment he had struggled and wrestled with such deter- 
mination, we may be sure, as such a man is capable of, to 
propitiate God by the sedulous fulfilment of all legal con- 
ditions. But by painful experience he had been made to 
feel that the effort was fruitless, the task beyond his strength ; 
and from the teaching of Jesus, conveyed to his knowledge in 
the roundabout way already pointed out, he learned that the 
effort was as unnecessary as it was fruitless, for that God was 
propitious by nature, and did not need to be propitiated. 
It was this doctrine, eagerly laid hold of, we may suppose, 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 379 

as a forlorn hope, which resulted in his conversion. But 
the strange thing at first sight is, that in order to explain 
to himself the great revolution in his inner life he re-introduced 
into his system of thought that very idea of atonement the 
abandonment of which had brought it about. A character was 
thus imparted to his entire way of thinking so materially 
different from that of Jesus as to lend some countenance to the 
idea that it had an independent origin. 

By founding his dogmatic system upon the death of Jesus 
viewed as an atonement, he may be said to have rehabilitated 
the idea of atonement, and to have restored it to that position 
in the theological province from which it had been thrust by 
the great Teacher. But this curious fact — this apparent in- 
consistency — becomes intelligible when we observe that the 
idea of atonement, as it reappears in his dogma, is no longer 
what it was in the religion of Israel, but has undergone a 
capital transformation. The Apostle's mind was so possessed 
or, we may say, dominated by the inherited idea of atonement, 
which, in his view, had the seal and sanction of divine authority, 
that he concluded that it must, under all circumstances, retain 
a meaning and a place in the religious relation. And the 
problem for him evidently was to reconcile with that idea what 
Jesus had said as to the essentially propitious character of God ; 
and this he accomplished to his own satisfaction by supposing 
that God had manifested this aspect of His character by pro- 
viding, in the person of the Messiah, as the substitute and 
representative of men, the propitiation which was necessary. 
Forgiveness, in virtue of this atonement, was thus seen to be 
the free, unbought gift of God, without merit or desert of man. 
The whole work of propitiation was laid upon the God-provided 
substitute, so that nothing more of the kind was requisite ; 
man individually and collectively was relieved of a task for him 
impossible ; gratuitously established in the religious relation 
which Jesus had in view. No propitiatory service, moral or 
ceremonial, was thenceforth to be required of the sinner ; the 
only service now to be demanded of him was the service of 
thanksgiving — the service of a soul inspired by love to mani- 
fest its grateful sense of the unspeakable grace of God in 
granting this great relief. The whole Mosaic ceremonial, 
whether of the nature of sin-offering or thank-offering, was 
absolutely abolished ; for even that of the latter description 



380 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

which remained in force was no longer a statutory offering, 
but such only as the heart, in gratitude for the great deliver- 
ance, could render — the soul being now a law to itself, freed 
from all servile or legal restraint, and placed in full enjoyment 
of the liberty of a child of God. To the Apostle it seemed as 
if in this way the majesty of the law had been fully vindicated 
by the revelation of divine grace on the cross of Christ. He 
was satisfied that his construction of the doctrine of Jesus 
brought it into perfect harmony with that of Moses and the 
prophets, though to the Jews it might be a stumbling-block. 
He even believed that he had the authority of the Old 
Testament for adopting a view which reverence and gratitude 
prompted him to take, and that the words of inspiration 
weighed with him in adopting it (i Cor. xv. 3). In this way 
he reconciled his inherited belief as to the necessity of atone- 
ment with his new belief that none was needed from man him- 
self as a sinner. 

The explanation of the ignominious death of Jesus thus 
arrived at would recommend itself to the Apostle's mind, first, 
because it would seem to show that continuity was preserved 
between the law which enjoined atonement and the doctrine of 
Jesus, which was exposed to the suspicion of discarding or 
ignoring it ; and, secondly, because it fell in with the Apostle's 
impulse to exalt to the utmost the person and function of 
Jesus. It presented Jesus to his mind not merely as shedding 
new light by his teaching upon the nature of the religious 
relation, but also as effecting a radical alteration upon it, 
as offering himself a sacrifice to improve the relation 
previously subsisting, or as fulfilling a condition necessary 
for its rearrangement or readjustment. 

To most men the doctrine of Jesus, even as illustrated 
by his life and death, might never have appealed, until it 
had thus been placed in connection with the ideas of sacrifice 
and atonement which had come to them by inheritance from 
the fathers as essential to the religious relation. But even 
Paul himself and others, who might be of finer and of deeper 
insight, and had experienced the directly emancipating effect of 
the new conception of God and man, might yet be induced to 
give in to the same ideas, and so to slide down into a lower 
form of doctrine than that of Jesus ; not, indeed, by the 
mere spirit of accommodation and of opportunism, in order 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 38 I 

to secure a ready reception for the evangelic doctrine, but 
because these ideas as applied to the death of Jesus recom- 
mended themselves, as has just been said, to their own minds 
also, as a means of exalting the function of Jesus, and of 
preserving the continuity of the new doctrine with the old. 

The view of the crucifixion thus obtained was fitted as no 
other could be to lend an absolute and permanent, instead 
of only a relative and historical, significance to the person 
of Jesus. It put a construction on his death the very opposite 
of that which superficially belonged to it, and attached to it a 
transcendent and supernatural character, besides affording the 
means of giving a clear, uncircuitous, and what might seem to 
be a sufficient explanation of that new moral and renovating 
power which had in some mysterious way been introduced into 
the lives of those who surrendered themselves to the influence 
of the gospel. 

For St. Paul himself the connection between his conversion 
and the death of Jesus became obvious. By regarding the 
latter as an atonement he placed it in a genetic relation to the 
grand revolution in the state of his feelings, or to that sense of 
reconciliation with God in which that revolution had issued. 
The change in his own mind was the sequel of the propitiatory 
effect of that atonement, or of the change effected by it on the 
mind of God. The sensible change which had taken place in 
the Apostle's relation to God was regarded by him as a result 
produced, not so much by the disclosure to his mind of the 
gracious relation in which God had always stood to the sinner, 
as rather by the mysterious change which had been effected on 
the mind of God by the self-sacrifice of Jesus Messiah. The 
Messiah had both effected a change in God's relation to man, 
and also revealed it to the Apostle on the way to Damascus ; 
and by this revelation had effected a change in the Apostle's 
relation to God. Or we may say simply, that by a tendency 
natural to men, St. Paul had transferred to God the varying 
states of his own consciousness. He regarded the change from 
a state of alienation to a state of reconciliation — which, by 
virtue of the death of Jesus, had taken place in himself — as the 
reflection or the sequel of a change effected by the same great 
event on the mind of God. In other words, the revolution 
effected by the cross of Christ was for the Apostle not merely 
subjective, but objective. A view of the death on the cross, 



382 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

which has fired the thoughts of millions of devout souls for so 
many ages, may well have commended itself to the Apostle in 
his moments of rapture. It gratified his craving to intensify to 
the uttermost the sense of obligation under which he had been 
laid by him who had condescended on the way to Damascus to 
snatch him as a brand from the burning. That view of it 
might not, indeed, be obviously consistent with the eternal and 
essential fatherliness of God,"'" as taught by Jesus, and accepted 
from that source by Paul himself; but an objection, which has 
not proved insurmountable to many generations of believers, 
might not be insuperable to the Apostle. It might even seem 
to him that only by connecting the idea of atonement with the 
death of Jesus could he be justified in pouring forth and lavish- 
ing upon him the full flood of his reverence and gratitude ; and 
here, as in other instances, the Apostle was little careful to 
reconcile conflicting ideas. 

In order to explain yet more fully the dogmatic form into 
which St. Paul threw the doctrine of divine placability as 
taught by Jesus, we may take into account, not only the 
categories of Jewish thought, which continued, unknown to 
himself, powerfully to sway and to limit his thought after he 
seemed to himself to have broken away from them; but also 
the difficulty, common to men generally, and not -least to the 
Oriental and Semitic mind, of embracing and holding a spiritual 
truth, such as that of divine grace and placability, in its naked 
simplicity, without the medium of symbolic form or sensuous 
representation. This was a- difficulty which may have been 
much felt by Paul himself, or which, at least, he had to provide 
for in the minds of those whom he sought to imbue with the 
new doctrine. The violent and ignominious death of him 
whom he believed to be the Messiah, and to have been raised 
again from the dead, in token of the divine sanction and author- 

* It is perhaps by way of meeting this obvious objection, and helping out 
the idea generally, that a Paulinistic writer says that Christ was fore- 
ordained (for this purpose) before the foundation of the world (1 Peter i. 20), 
and that the Apokalyptist speaks of Christ as slain from the foundation 
of the world (Rev. xiii. 8) ; as much as to say that the atonement, though 
accomplished in time, was part of an eternal purpose — an essential mani- 
festation of the divine nature. But if these and other parallel passages 
were written with such an intention, they can only be regarded as a 
makeshift. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 383 

ization of his claims, besides being an event so mysterious as 
not to admit of being explained, except by the idea that it was 
undergone for sins not his own, also supplied just what was 
needed to give to his Jewish mind a firm hold of the gracious 
character of God ; an object or ground for the imagination to 
dwell upon ; a medium or proof of an idea which would other- 
wise only float vaguely in the mind. Instead of calling upon 
men, as Jesus had done, to believe in the forgiveness of sin, just 
because it is God's property to forgive, or because such a faith 
is indispensable to the development of man's moral nature, St. 
Paul pointed to the crucifixion as, in some sense, a ground and 
guarantee for divine forgiveness, even though, looked at more 
closely, it may seem to be an infraction of that very principle, 
and to compromise or place it in a doubtful light, as we have 
insisted, besides presenting to the understanding difficulties 
greater than those which it is designed to remove, though of a 
different kind. 

One of these difficulties is experienced when we proceed to 
answer the question, whether the atonement was made for 
some of the human race, or for all without exception. This 
is a question which cannot be evaded : and the answer to it 
either way brings us face to face with overwhelming objections, 
l?oth in relation to the character of God and to the requirement 
of faith. Whereas, the idea of divine love operating through 
the divine order, which is ever upon the side of the true 
penitent, if more difficult for the mind to apprehend, or vividly 
to realize, is at least consistent with itself and free from 
intrinsic objections. But here, as throughout this essay, it is 
our object not so much to criticize Paul's dogma as to account 
for its origin and genesis. And when we apply criticism to the 
Pauline dogmatic construction, it is intended only to show that 
that construction is not the necessary inference from the teach- 
ing of Jesus ; and to explain how it comes that, while the 
orthodox believer still clings to St. Paul's dogma, increasing 
multitudes of those who make religion a subject of thought, 
are falling back upon the simple, undogmatic teaching of Jesus, 
and cherish the feeling that, in doing so, they retain the sub- 
stance of Christianity. 

Placed in the light in which St. Paul learned to regard it, 
the suffering of death was seen to be worthy of the Messiah ; 
worthy even in proportion to its ignominy; fitted to exalt the 



384 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Messianic office, and to give a new and higher meaning even to 
those prophetic words which seemed to present the Messianic 
career as one of triumph. For here was a triumph indeed to 
those who could see it, achieved for men over the powers of 
evil. In connection with the sublime patience which Jesus had 
exhibited in the prospect and suffering of death, and with those 
doctrines of his, of which it was the supreme illustration, such a 
view might well be taken of it, and afford a satisfactory answer 
to that urgent question respecting the cui bono which must 
have suggested itself to the earlier disciples as well as to St. 
Paul, and which, had it not admitted of a clear and distinct 
answer, might have proved fatal to the further progress of the 
gospel. The same view explained how this righteous man was 
not saved by his righteousness, and how he might be a chosen 
instrument of God and yet be given over as a victim to human 
malice. His very innocence and sinlessness, it might be 
thought, was what, according to the principles of the Mosaic 
law, fitted and qualified him to expiate human guilt. The 
belief of the original disciples in his Messiahship had made 
them incredulous to the last as to the sufferings of which he 
warned them; but after he had endured the sufferings which 
he had had in prospect, the disciples could not but soon perceive 
that those characters of innocence and sinlessness which had 
formerly pointed him out to their spiritual apprehension as the 
Messiah, and been most of all illustrated in his person, were 
what also qualified him to atone for the sins of others. The 
traditional ideas of the Messiah and of the suffering " Servant 
of God " were thus made, by the course of events, to coalesce 
in their minds ; and the image of a Messiah suffering, but 
triumphant in suffering, took possession of their minds, re- 
conciling ideas, which in the Old Testament stood apart, 
as if mutually exclusive and repellent ; and enriching the world 
with a new standard of humanity. 

The difference between the doctrine of Jesus and the dogma 
of St. Paul may be formally defined by saying that the former 
was the simple, unreasoned utterance of the immediate in- 
tuitive moral and religious consciousness of the great Teacher, 
while the latter was the Apostle's reflection upon the former 
placed in the light of the crucifixion and resurrection ; the 
form which the Apostle adopted to bring into palpable or 
sensuous expression the spiritual soteriological method as 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 385 

taught by Jesus and exemplified in the experience of the 
Apostle himself. It could not escape his notice that the 
method of Jesus was signally illustrated in the conduct and 
catastrophe of his life. Then the Apostle's belief in the 
resurrection naturally imparted a transcendent aspect to the 
person of the Teacher and placed him in an indefinitely 
causative relation to the soteriological process. The Apostle 
was thus led to convert the self-redemptive process as taught 
by Jesus into a heterosoteric process which ran side by side 
with that other and mirrored itself in it. This explanation 
at once of the difference and the correspondence between the 
teaching of the Master and of the disciple enables us to 
account for several remarkable facts. (1) It explains how 
it came to pass that notwithstanding the great metamorphosis 
which the doctrine underwent in the dogma, this latter yet 
retains or reflects so much of the spirit of the former. (2) It 
accounts in part at least for the rapid propagation of Chris- 
tianity, inasmuch as the doctrine of Jesus was thus presented 
to the world in a popular form, level to the apprehension of 
the average man, and eminently calculated to call into play 
the mighty force of that devotional sentiment which is as 
widespread as humanity itself. And (3) it explains how a 
man, gifted like St. Paul, could yet be persuaded that he 
had " received " his doctrine from the Lord, in other words, 
that he had been guided in the construction of his dogma by 
the Spirit of God. 

The doctrine of Jesus, gleaned by St. Paul, as we have seen, 
from the victims of his persecuting zeal, must have served to 
the Apostle as a canon, resting on the authority of Jesus, and 
verified by his own experience ; and when the correspondence 
between it and the interpretation, by means of Jewish cate- 
gories, of the death and resurrection of Jesus, disclosed itself 
point by point to his reflection, it came home to him with 
the authority of a revelation from heaven. Cases of an 
analogous kind are to be met with in history. When Philo 
speaks of being sometimes overtaken by a divine afflatus or 
ecstasy he may be understood to refer to the joyful certitude 
produced in his mind by a crisis or fruitful fusion of his 
thought. And just such an ecstasy, falling within the ex- 
perience of St. Paul, may have seemed to him to clothe his 
thought with divine authority. 

2 13 



386 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

We do not intend by anything which has been said to imply 
that St. Paul was the first of the disciples to connect the idea of 
expiation with the death of Jesus. There are many indications 
in the epistles of St. Paul, as well as in the Acts of the 
Apostles, if not also in the synoptists, that he was forestalled 
in this view by the earlier disciples, and that the Jewish 
Christians generally attached the same idea to the crucifixion. 
They did so indeed, but in a sense so different, that it led, as 
will afterwards be seen, to a conflict between the Jewish and 
Gentile sections of the Church, which came near to rending 
the Church in twain. But, without touching on this conflict 
here, we shall meanwhile confine our remarks to the develop- 
ment of the dogma in the mind of St. Paul. 

The sudden somersault or transition in the mind of Paul 
from the purely spiritual and autosoteric views of Jesus back 
to the dogmatic and heterosoteric Jewish point of view is not 
without analogy in the history of religion. An analogous 
fact may be seen in the sudden transition in the mind of 
Luther from that solitary exercise of autonomy on his part 
which resulted in the Reformation to the heteronomous posi- 
tion which he afterwards adopted, and of which Protestant 
theology was the result. As might be shown in Luther's 
case, so in the case of Paul, there were powerful motives or 
considerations acting on his mind to produce this self-contra- 
diction. There was, in the first place, the tendency to an 
anthropomorphic conception of God, to which his, as w r ell as 
most other minds, was disposed. When a man contemplates 
the crimes and the inhumanities of his fellow-men, it requires 
a great effort of self-suppression to forgive and pity the wrong- 
doer ; and so he is apt to transfer a like necessity to the mind 
of God, and to suppose that in forgiving His erring children 
God requires to repress His feeling of righteous indignation, to 
put restraint upon Himself, and, in short, to perform an act of 
self-sacrifice — an idea and mode of expression of which even 
modern theologians make use. It is true that there is no such 
division in the divine being as there is in the finite, every act 
of God being the act of His whole and undivided nature, and 
that to think otherwise is anthropomorphic. Yet this is the 
conception of God which has embodied itself in the Pauline or 
orthodox doctrine of the atonement, and has given to that 
doctrine its hold upon the human mind. It is a doctrine 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 3<S; 

which represents the truth, not as it is absolutely or in itself, 
but figuratively, symbolically, or approximately, and may have 
been the only form in which the truth could have been made 
level to the apprehension whether of Jews or Gentiles in that 
age. 

Further, it has to be considered that St. Paul's mind was 
deeply saturated by the Hebrew or Jewish ideas on the subject 
of atonement. These were, that sin had to be expiated by 
suffering ; that it was indifferent by whom the suffering was 
borne, whether by the guilty person himself or by some one 
connected with him, by family, tribal, or national ties ; that the 
undeserved sufferings of the innocent were of expiatory virtue 
and of vicarious efficacy. Such ideas may have been suggested 
to the minds of people and prophet by the spectacle constantly 
presented to their eyes of dumb animals, some of them the 
very picture of innocence, devoted, according to prevalent 
sacrificial practice, as an atonement for the sins of individuals 
or of the nation at large. Or these ideas may have been 
derived from the observation that the penalty of sin and crime 
often fell, not upon the guilty, but upon the innocent, and so 
took end. By the powerfully poetic imagination of Isaiah this 
law or fact of common human life which had arrested the mind 
of Israel was dramatically presented or impersonated in his- 
torical or concrete form in the " Servant of God," whose 
voluntary endurance of suffering for sins not his own was 
the highest proof of his righteousness. The application of 
this same idea to interpret the intention and significance of the 
death of the Messiah must, we may be sure, have had an 
irresistible fascination for St. Paul, as well as for the other 
disciples. The tragic fate of Jesus Messiah would seem to him 
as to them to be the grandest exemplification of the constantly 
recurring phenomenon. For, if the idealized dramatic repre- 
sentation of this phenomenon by the prophet has ever since 
been regarded as a forecast or prediction of that world- 
historical event, we can easily imagine that the kindred spirit 
of the Apostle would catch up the suggestion in contemplat- 
ing the same great tragedy. 

The doctrine of the atonement in St. Paul's epistles has this 
in common with the Jewish doctrine, that it presupposes a 
certain imperfectness or shortcoming in the divine fatherliness : 
the presence in the divine mind of some obstruction to its 



388 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

complete manifestation, by the removal of which it may the 
more fully and demonstratively be established. To a soul 
like Paul's thirsting for righteousness, but yet conscience- 
stricken, laden with a sense of sin, and oppressed by a 
feeling of impotence, it might, we may think, have been as 
exhilarating to have the disclosure made to it, that in the 
nature of God there was no obstacle to the deliverance of 
the sinner from the power of evil, and that the very idea of 
divine fatherliness excluded any obstacle on the part of God, 
as that such an obstacle having existed it had yet been 
removed by an act of supreme self-sacrifice on the part of 
God. But the latter view would, in such a mind, evoke a 
pathos, an emotion which the other would not, somewhat in 
the same way as the symbolical or dramatic representation of 
a principle in the form of a historical event makes a more 
vivid and affecting impression than a mere naked statement 
of the principle itself. This may have been unconsciously felt 
by St. Paul, and may have conduced to his adoption of the 
dogmatic construction or interpretation of the crucifixion. The 
subjective obstacle to his hopeful pursuit of the ethical ideal — 
viz., his conception of God as an exacting Judge requiring to 
be propitiated, which had been removed as a weight from his 
soul by the insight which he had gained into the divine char- 
acter — presented itself to his imagination by reason of that 
very pathos as an objective obstacle which had been removed 
by the self-sacrifice of him who had graciously stooped from 
heaven to confer and remonstrate with him on his insane 
behaviour. The idea of the cross, which was at once the 
instrument of the death of Jesus and the symbol of the 
soteriological process, as proclaimed by Jesus, fired the soul 
of the Apostle and became the great and almost sole theme 
of his gospel (i Cor. ii. 2), an observation which, by the way, 
seems to justify, if anything of the kind is needed, our conten- 
tion that the teaching of Jesus in the main was soteriological. 

It is evident, too, that if we leave out of sight the dogmatic 
element of St. Paul's teaching, we find it anticipated at even- 
point by that of Jesus, whose claim, therefore, to be the 
Founder of Christianity cannot be transferred to the Apostle. 
Thus, even if Jesus did not use the word " cross," as he is 
reported by the synoptists to have done — for we do not wish 
to make such a question turn upon the occurrence of a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 389 

word — yet the idea, expressed or symbolized by it, of self- 
denial and self-abnegation enters as essentially and as per- 
vadingly into his doctrine as into that of St. Paul. The 
only thing which by any possibility can be placed to the 
credit of the latter in this connection is that he has rendered 
that idea more pathetic and more touching by connecting it 
with the actual or material cross on which Jesus died. And 
there can be no doubt that the Pauline doctrine of the atone- 
ment effected visibly or "evidently" (Gal. iii. 1) on the cross, 
has a pedagogic value which it will retain so long, but only 
so long, as the supernatural idea retains its hold of the human 
mind. 

The practice of atonement by sacrifice seems to have been 
universal, for unnumbered ages, throughout the ancient world ; 
and to have approved itself to the human heart as the natural 
means of paying homage to God or of propitiating His favour. 
And though, according to our view, Jesus dispensed with it, as 
having no place in the religious relation, yet, by connecting the 
idea of atonement with his death, the early Church thought to 
conserve it as an approved means of quickening the power of 
sympathy, and of enlisting religious feeling on behalf of the 
moral and spiritual elements of the doctrines of Jesus. This is 
one mode of accounting for the Pauline doctrine of atonement ; 
or we may account for it somewhat differently by regarding it 
as a concession to his Jewish feeling, a compromise between 
the doctrine of Jesus and the doctrine of the Pharisees ; an 
indication that the Apostle, imbued as he was with the evan- 
gelic, universalistic spirit, was yet not able to emancipate him- 
self so completely as Jesus had done from the influence of 
Jewish provincialism. 

By exchanging the heterosoteric Jewish idea for the auto- 
soteric, Jesus showed how completely he had emancipated 
himself, how near he went to putting an end to Jewish thought. 
He only did not separate himself entirely from it because his 
doctrine still rested on its religious presuppositions ; and re- 
tained, in the act of exalting, its ethical and thcistic ideas. 
The step which Jesus thus took was too far in advance for 
Paul to follow his lead. Indeed, the Pauline dogma was 
nothing but the very natural though unconscious endeavour, as 
we have already seen, to preserve continuity between the 
Christian and the Jewish idea of the religious relation at a 



390 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

vital point where continuity seemed in danger of being broken. 
The law had said that without shedding of blood there could 
be no remission of sins ; but Jesus had proclaimed in absolute 
terms, without respect to Jewish privilege, or to propitiatory 
forms of worship, the boundless love and good-will of the 
Heavenly Father towards His penitent children ; and the 
consciousness which he sought to awaken in his disciples was 
but the echo of that sentiment. To reconcile these two 
antagonistic positions, the Church, through St. Paul as its 
spokesman, declared the blood of him who made the announce- 
ment of the unconditioned placability of God to be of sur- 
passing virtue; an atonement of universal efficacy; the ground 
of that free forgiveness which was the main element of the 
Christian consciousness. Of course, this proposition of St. 
Paul cannot .be verified. The human consciousness may bear 
witness to the fact, that forgiveness may be confidently laid 
hold of by the true penitent without challenge from his own 
higher nature — the divinity within him. But to certify that 
such privilege is due, in any sense, to the blood shed on 
Calvary is wholly beyond the reach and faculty of conscious- 
ness. Clearly this is, in Arnold's language, an unverifiable or 
extra-belief. 

We can see that, in his endeavour to free the Christian spirit 
from the Jewish particularistic limitations which clung to it, St. 
Paul made use, for this end, of Jewish materials and rabbinical 
modes of thought. His mode of ratiocination was that of 
contemporary Jewish theology, to which he had been trained 
in the schools, and which had become as a second nature to 
him. But it may also have been employed by him of set 
purpose, in order to convict Judaism out of its own mouth, 
and to turn its own weapons against itself. An artificial, 
hybrid, and somewhat incongruous character was thus given to 
his dialectic. In the construction of his dogma he proceeded 
upon the plan of arbitrarily retaining or discarding the Jewish 
categories of thought just as it suited his purpose, And it has 
been observed by Weizsacker and others, that the same Apostle 
who did most to free Christianity from the limits of Judaism, 
also contributed much to preserve in it the Jewish spirit. 

There is ever an a priori presumption, that a doctrine far in 
advance of an age will not be comprehended by the age, how- 
ever clearly it may be stated ; and the fact that the Pauline 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 39 I 

form of doctrine took such hold of that generation may be 
regarded as a proof that it had retained or incorporated with 
itself certain elements of thought, inherited from the past, which 
did not properly belong to it ; elements which were even at 
variance with its spirit, but which helped to overcome prejudice 
against what was novel, and by recommending it to the men 
of that age, invested it with such prestige as to recommend it 
to many subsequent ages. The doctrine of Jesus was but the 
expression of his deep and independent consciousness or con- 
viction of the goodness of the Heavenly Father ; of the love 
rooted in the divine nature ; a love so self-subsistent that it 
did not need to be conciliated, but acted rather as an aboriginal 
impulse to conciliate all rational creatures, and to train them to 
the love and practice of goodness for its own sake, after the 
fashion of the divine. This mental attitude into which Jesus 
sought to bring his disciples was in strong contrast to that of 
the Pharisees, all whose religious services had for their aim to 
propitiate the goodwill of God, and to establish a claim upon 
his favour by conventional moralities and punctilious attention 
to statutory observances and expiatory rites. St. Paul's doc- 
trine, again, is evidently a mean or compromise between the 
two. For, according to him, God has been propitiated, only 
not by sacrifice offered or observance practised by man himself, 
but by the self-sacrifice of one who was the divinely appointed 
substitute or representative of man. And now, man no longer 
needed to atone for his sin, but only to believe in the atone- 
ment which had been offered once for all upon the cross by his 
substitute ; and so to enjoy the benefit of a work already 
accomplished, or, perhaps, to join in with a work already begun, 
and to build upon a foundation securely laid. The Apostle 
thus got rid or kept clear of the mercenary, or Pharisaic taint, 
and sought with true evangelic aim, if not by a wholly evan- 
gelic method, to awaken love and gratitude as the propelling 
motives of human effort. 

From this point of view it may be said that, practically, 
the doctrine of Jesus and the doctrine of St. Paul amount to 
much the same thing; that the religious relation, which, accord- 
ing to Jesus, is immanent, is, according to St. Paul, brought to 
pass by the cross ; or, that St. Paul represents God as placed, 
by means of a propitiation offered outside the human sphere, 
in the same relation to us as Jesus represents Him to be 



392 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

placed, apart from any transaction of the kind. But there is 
this great difference, that St. Paul's doctrine sacrifices the idea 
of the absolute goodness and unchangeableness of God, and 
obscures that feature of the divine order according to which 
the sense of forgiveness, even as of necessity, and irrespective 
of all other conditions, follows on repentance, and the harvest 
of good is assured to him who sows the seed of good. Accord- 
ing to the same doctrine also, human redemption is effected by 
the somewhat mechanical, cumbrous, and artificial contrivance 
of introducing a third party into a transaction which lies 
properly between God and man, or between the higher or 
divine and the lower nature of man, i.e., by the introduction of 
a supernatural element into the soteriological process. Finally, 
instead of relying, as Jesus did, on the intrinsic evidence 
of the doctrine which attributes boundless goodness to the 
divine nature, St. Paul points to the historical fact of the 
atonement made on Calvary — " He that spared not His own 
son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall He not with 
him also freely give us all things" (Rom. viii. 32). He points 
to the cross as the instrument of an act of self-sacrifice on the 
part of God ; an idea of which it is difficult for us to form 
a conception, seeing that in God there is no darkness at 
all — no lower nature to call for, or to afford the necessary 
condition for such an act — an objection to the Pauline view 
which is none the less conclusive because of its being simple 
and intelligible. It surely invalidates the absolute freeness 
and aboriginal character of the love of God as taught by 
Jesus, if it be said that a sacrifice of any kind whatever 
on the part of God, whether that of a third person or a 
self-sacrifice, was needed in the way of propitiating His love, 
or setting it free to act. 

And here we may introduce our decisive reply to the allega- 
tion, which has frequently been advanced of late, that Paul is 
the real founder of Christianity, viz., that we recognize in the 
teaching of Jesus, simple as it is, an apprehension of the 
religious relation at once higher and more consistent with 
itself, in regard both to the human and the divine nature, 
than that of Paul. The former would conduct us to a 
spiritual height above that on which the latter has placed 
us. The faith which Jesus enjoined was devotion to the 
righteousness of God, that is, to the ideal of humanity. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 393 

Paul changed this into devotion to the person of Jesus, in 
whom he saw that ideal embodied. The same thing has been 
expressed by saying that the doctrine of Jesus was converted 
by St. Paul into the dogma concerning Jesus. The dogma 
which we thus owe to the Apostle is not, we have already 
admitted, wholly disparate from the evangelic doctrine, but 
rather a close reflection of it in symbolic form ; and has 
rendered a great provisional or paedagogic service to the 
religious idea. The abstract unembodied ideal, as presented 
in the teaching of Jesus and illustrated by his example, 
was not calculated to attract and attach the minds of the 
bulk of mankind ; and it was probably a necessity in the 
very nature of things that the personality in which that ideal 
was seen to be most adequately manifested, should be raised for 
the human understanding to the position of that divine nature 
with which the ideal is identical (Matth. v. 48). 

But not the less on that account do we affirm that the 
dogma of St. Paul is a descent, a falling away from the 
doctrine of Jesus. Had Paul not been preceded by Jesus, 
he might (such is our opinion of his religious genius and 
his ethical intensity) have attempted, on the basis of an 
independent development of thought, to reform and revolu- 
tionize the national religion. But his dogmatic construction 
or modification of the religion of Jesus suffices to show 
that he was too much dominated by Jewish ideas to have 
effected his purpose, or at least to have done more than 
to found or originate a Jewish sect. He could never have 
reached the idea of the perfect and essential Fatherhood 
of God, or have thrown aside, as Jesus did, the ideas of 
sacrifice and mediation as unessential to the religious relation. 
He was not able to accept or apprehend the doctrine of Jesus 
in its simplicity, even when presented to him, or to incor- 
porate it into his own system of thought, except through these 
foreign and irrelevant ideas. And the probability is, that in 
any form of religion which he could have originated, these 
would have been primary and essential instead of being 
secondary, interjectional, and instrumental, as in the dogmatic 
form which he impressed upon the reluctant religion of Jesus. 

That God forgives sins freely, that with His consent we may 
leave our sins behind us and pass on to a better life, and that 
expiation for sins that are past is unnecessary, is a doctrine 



394 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

which men have much difficulty in accepting. They may 
have a strong feeling of their own sinfulness, but having no 
adequate conception of the nature of sin, they do not perceive 
that by its nature it is inexpiable, but imagine that some 
great thing has to be done, some great price to be paid, in 
short, some atonement to be made, whether by themselves 
or by another in their stead, in order to its remission. This 
is a universal idea confined to no age, ancient or modern, 
and holds a very conspicuous place in the Old Testament, 
underlying and pervading its whole system of thought. Yet 
the rationale of it is nowhere clearly or definitely stated, and 
in the synagogal theology the doctrine seems to be explicit 
that atonement may be made in various forms, singly or 
combined, according to circumstances, most conspicuously by 
sacrifice and other legal ritual observances, and also by peni- 
tence, by acts of an ascetic or purificatory character, by 
almsgiving, by restitution, and even by the supererogatory 
merits of the fathers. Many things might thus contribute 
to effect the sinner's forgiveness; many things had to be 
taken into account before the sinner could be satisfied of his 
being forgiven; feelings of great anxiety, lest some necessary 
thing had been omitted, were produced in his mind, and a 
consequent uncertainty as to his condition in the sight of 
God. It hardly needs to be added, that such a state of theo- 
logical opinion must also have contributed much to fix and 
strengthen the mercenary and servile habit of religion in the 
Jewish mind. 

But while letting go, as we have seen, the simple teaching of 
Jesus, in so far as it excluded in toto the idea of atonement, 
St. Paul yet removed all uncertainty from the believer's mind 
by his emphatic declaration that there was one and only one 
atonement for all sin whatever, and that it had been accom- 
plished once for all upon the cross. It may, in this respect, 
be affirmed of the dogma of St. Paul, as of the doctrine of 
Jesus, that it is anti-Judaical and anti-legal in the highest 
degree. The Apostle may indeed be said to have returned, 
as by a circuitous route, to the point from which he started 
at his conversion, and the circuit thus made by him encloses 
the area of his dogma. But by his dogma he applied an 
antidote to that legal and particularistic spirit which was apt 
to pass over and to infect the Christian Church through its 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 395 

Jewish members ; and we have mainly to ascribe it to him, 
that the Church was, if not completely, yet in a great measure 
saved from this danger. 

For though, as has been shown, Jesus himself could not but 
realize the universalistic range and tendency of his doctrine, yet, 
whether because he felt a tenderness toward those forms of 
worship by which his soul had been nurtured, or because he 
deemed it inexpedient to alarm the feelings and susceptibilities 
of his disciples before they were at home in the true spiritual 
worship, the various utterances of his which bore upon this 
subject had a delphic and even conflicting sound, which left 
it doubtful whether in his view the rites and usages of Jewish 
worship were to retain their place in his new religion. The 
apparent conflict in his teaching on this point has, it is true, no 
existence for those critics who regard Matth. v. 1 8, 19, "Till 
heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise 
pass from the law, till all be fulfilled," as an interpolation ; and 
Matth. ix. 17, " Neither do men put new wine into old bottles," 
etc., as the index of his true position in regard to the law. 
And it can scarcely be denied that much may be said in support 
of such a criticism ; this especially, that Matth. v. 19 is, as 
much as can be, conceived in the spirit of Pharisaic legalism, 
whereas v. 20 is manifestly a strongly expressed depreciation 
of it, " Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteous- 
ness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter 
into the kingdom of heaven." But in spite of this and other 
textual difficulties, we are not inclined to question the authen- 
ticity of vv. 1 8 and 1 9. For we must take into consideration 
that the new legislation may in a very true sense be regarded 
as a fulfilment of the older ; that in common with other 
founders of religion, such as Zoroaster, Confucius, and Mahomet, 
Jesus desired to represent himself as a continuator and re- 
former of the previously existing religion; and that he must 
have known well that he ran the risk of being regarded with 
suspicion as a setter forth of strange doctrines. These con- 
siderations make it by no means improbable that he would 
not only be careful not to run unnecessary risk, but also that 
he might make use of such a statement as that in vv. 18, 19 
by way of soothing prejudice and allaying suspicion, even 
though he could unfold his new doctrine in all its aspects 
only by means of statements which to his countrymen would 



396 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

seem to be not very consistent with that other. Still, it must 
be confessed that the verbal exegesis of such passages does 
not help us much. Every one will be guided in his interpre- 
tation of these by general and extraneous or collateral con- 
siderations. We therefore content ourselves with repeating 
that it was reserved for St. Paul to give forth a certain sound 
upon this point. He it was who saw clearly, and made the 
Church at large to see, that through the retention of Jewish 
forms the spirit of legalism might insinuate itself into the 
Christian community, or even throw it back into Judaism, 
besides arresting the progress of the gospel among the 
Gentiles. 

The Pauline dogma excluded the idea of propitiatory sendee 
on the part of man, and along with that the whole system of 
worship of which that service was the centre. The dogma 
did not absolutely dispense with atonement as the doctrine of 
Jesus did, but it was fitted by the very use which it retained of 
that idea to bring home to the minds of men in vivid, because 
in outward and historical form, that conception of divine love 
which excludes the need of all expiation on the part of the 
sinner himself; and to supply the great incentive to that heart- 
felt devotion of the life, the consciousness of which relieves the 
soul in a kingly manner of all painful anxiety as to the 
observance of outward forms, and constitutes the soul a law 
to itself. It thus set aside the law of outward ordinances and 
statutory observances more effectually even than the more pure 
and thorough doctrine of Jesus could do at that time, just 
because it put something massive and palpable in the place 
of these. And in this respect Paul may be said to have 
rendered a great and, under reservation, an indispensable service 
to the Christian Church. Not that in the creation of his dogma 
the Apostle had this last object primarily in view. The dogma 
was essentially the spontaneous growth of his mind ; and if 
there was any semi-conscious calculation in it at all, it was 
primarily to meet the Apostle's own personal need, rather than 
to meet the need of the Church at large. He may have sought 
to maintain at initial intensity, or to charge with growing 
emotion, that aspiration after the ideal which had been fired in 
him by the revelation of Christ to his soul, by representing to 
himself that ideal as perfectly embodied in the person of Christ. 
For this purpose he turned not to the details of that earthly life 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 39/ 

of Jesus, as did the mythical fancy with the same end in view, 
but concentrated his thoughts upon the closing scene of that 
life, in which he saw in typical form a transcendent exhibition 
of all evangelical righteousness ; a transaction which appealed 
powerfully to the warmest feelings of his heart, and enlisted all 
his sympathies in behalf of the ideal. He may also have felt, 
and, no doubt, did feel, that what was thus a need for himself 
was no less a need for his fellow Christians, and that it was his 
bounden duty to preach the gospel in this form to all who 
would listen to him. 

The idea of atonement is not only the real point of contact 
between Jewish and Pauline theology, as is obvious, but also the 
true centre, or rather starting-point of the latter in its career of 
development. A numerous school of modern theologians, in- 
deed, would have us believe that the doctrine of incarnation is 
the grand doctrine, to which that of the atonement, and all 
others in the Pauline system, are subordinate ; but there can be 
no question that belief in the atonement was the genetic prius 
of belief in the incarnation and in the divinity of Christ : the 
centre out of which the whole dogma was evolved. These 
doctrines of the incarnation and of the divinity of Jesus are 
inevitable inferences from that of atonement, provided this is 
regarded as of objective significance and as an offering pre- 
sented to God, which was certainly its significance for the mind 
St. Paul. 1 Thence, it may be noted, that where incarnation is 
promoted to the central position in so-called orthodox doctrine, 
there is generally, if not invariably, a tendency to regard atone- 
ment only in its subjective aspect: to represent the work and 
death of Jesus not as the means by which God is reconciled 
to men, but simply as the means by which God reconciles men 
to Himself — a curtailment of its significance and value which 
we see little or nothing in St. Paul's epistles to warrant — and to 
regard his mission into the world as a sort of show-miracle, 
intended merely to display an ideal human life as a stimulus 
and object for imitation. This is a view of it, of which it has 
been well and strikingly observed, that had it been adopted 
by St. Paul, he would necessarily have made more frequent 
reference to the details of the earthly life of Jesus as exemplary 
to that of believers, which yet he seldom, or rather never, does : 
while his constant reference is to the death upon the cross as the 
ordained means of salvation. This same view of the death of 



39^ THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Jesus, as a mere display or manifestation of divine love, comes 
as near as can be to the idea of " a sign from heaven," a mere 
display, not indeed of divine power, such as the Jews demanded, 
but of divine goodness ; and throws an air of unreality over the 
great event, which is fitted to deprive it of all genuine influence 
upon the mind of the spectator. 

There is truth, no doubt, in what Weizsacker says, that St. 
Paul nowhere speaks of the wrath of God being removed by the 
death of Christ ; but only of the latter as a work of divine love, 
which does not permit us to think of there being any hindrance 
to its exercise in the nature of God Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). But 
to the omission of this link of thought in the writings of St. 
Paul we attach no decisive importance. In regard to the 
omission of this thought, we are disposed to say sub intelligi- 
tur. For, if the Apostle nowhere says that the wrath of God 
was appeased by the cross of Christ, he yet, in many places, 
speaks of His wrath ; and shuts us up to the inference, that it 
was appeased by that instrumentality. How little importance 
need be attached to this negative consideration, or to this 
omission on the part of the Apostle, is shown by the observation 
which Weizsacker lets fall, shortly before, viz., that while the 
Apostle speaks of the death of Jesus as a sacrifice or offering 
for sin, he nowhere says, what is said in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, that it had superseded, or come in place of, the sacri- 
fices under the law, though no one can doubt, that this was his 
opinion, or that such a remark lay in the very line of his 
thought. The truth seems to be, that for the Apostle the wrath 
of God against sinners was a reality, to reconcile which with the 
fact that He had given His Son to die for them was a puzzle, 
to the solution of which the Apostle did not see his way. He 
probably believed that God's love had prevailed to that extent 
over His wrath at their sin. And if this be so, it seems to show 
that there was a certain dualism in his conception of the divine 
nature which he could not explain away. In the fourth Gospel 
and in 1st John the dualistic element is even more unmistak- 
able ; and indeed this element is essential to dogmatic or 
supernatural Christianity in all its forms. 

For St. Paul and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
the death of Jesus on the cross was an atonement analogous to 
the ancient animal sacrifices, which they regarded as prefiguring 
it. As the Jews considered that the death of the victim on the 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 399 

altar was graciously accepted in place of the sinner's who pre- 
sented the offering, so the Apostle applied that idea to the death 
of Jesus, and considered it to be the real expiation, of which 
those others had been only types and figures. The analogy is 
more fully and clearly expressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews ; 
but it underlies the doctrine of St. Paul, and whatever the idea 
of a subjective atonement may have to recommend it to the 
school of modern theologians referred to, it does not cover the 
idea in St. Paul's mind. He shared in the sacrificial idea 
common in the ancient world, viz., that God in his mercy 
accepted the animal's life or soul in place of that which had 
been forfeited by the sinner. It might have occurred to 
men's minds, that God in mercy might have pardoned the 
sinner without exacting such a worthless substitute. But the 
men of the old world were unable to conceive of mercy being 
extended to the sinner, unless God's displeasure with his sin 
were first appeased by an offering, which would at least express 
an acknowledgment of His right to punish. They could not 
rid themselves of a certain dualism in the nature of God, 
or resist the tendency to make an anthropomorphic distinction 
between His mercy and His justice ; and the sacrificial or 
expiatory idea, objectively considered, was needed to reconcile 
the action of both for the benefit of the sinner. This idea, 
under certain modifications, passed over into St. Paul's doctrine, 
and remains to this day the substratum of orthodox theology. 
He regarded the life which Jesus had surrendered on the cross 
as the price which had been paid for the forfeited life of man. 
Human redemption was for him the resultant of two diverg- 
ent forces in the divine nature. And he was probably 
inspired by his singular personal experience to draw wide 
the distinction between law and grace. His zeal for the former 
had made him a persecutor and a blasphemer; his conversion 
was regarded by him as an effect of sovereign grace ; and the 
development of this unreal distinction issued in all those dia- 
lectical subtleties which characterize his dogmatic system, 
rendering it hard to be understood and susceptible of such 
conflicting interpretations as to have exercised the ingenuity 
of commentators, and to have made it the subject of theological 
contention for nearly two millenniums, without any pros] net 
as yet of a definite settlement. But the modern idea of 
divine unity, not numerical but spiritual, of which mercy and 



400 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

justice are but different aspects to human apprehension, has 
overthrown this doctrine of atonement, and revealed to us that 
the distinction between the two so-called attributes exists only 
in the finite, but not in the infinite subject. By nothing, per- 
haps, is the purity of the religious insight of Jesus so much 
shown as by his omitting — that is, discarding — the idea of 
atonement from connection with divine grace and forgive- 
ness, or, let us say, from the religious relation. That idea, 
on the other hand, was too strongly entrenched in the mind 
of St. Paul to be got rid of. Instead of discarding it alto- 
gether, the Apostle had recourse to the compromise, already 
attributed to him, of removing it out of the human sphere 
into a region of mystery, and making it, by a sort of gnostic 
treatment, the moment of a theogonic process. In his 
theology, indeed, atonement was in no respect as it had been 
in Jewish theology, either morally or ceremonially, an act of 
man himself accepted by God, nor was it a result produced 
in the soul of man by an act on the part of God ; but it 
was an act of God, not graciously prescribing or accepting an 
imperfect sacrifice on the part of man, but Himself offering 
a perfect sacrifice in the person of His Son, and transferring 
the guilt of the sinner at once and for ever to a holy victim. 
From this point of view, we can see that Jesus was a pure 
idealist whom the age could not comprehend, while, on the 
other hand, Paul as a teacher remained in touch with his age 
by incorporating the doctrine of atonement with the teaching 
of Jesus, and so imparting to the religious relation a juridical 
and realistic character. The various attempts which have been 
made, by way of conciliating modern thought, to strip St. 
Paul's view of that relation of this juridical element, are but 
samples of what Jesus meant when he warned his disciples 
against pouring new wine into old bottles. They are but so 
many attempts to rehabilitate or rationalize conceptions that 
are out of date, and, by a veiled and modernized use of the 
allegorical form of interpretation, to make them square with the 
thought of the new era. All systems of thought, even the most 
diverse, whether in the moral or spiritual field, have certain 
points of contact, and by the exercise of an ingenious dialectic 
may be made to run together and brought into a certain degree, 
greater or less, of propinquity. But by no ingenuity, however 
specious, can* the modern ideas of the religious relation be 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 40 I 

identified with those which underlie the dogma of St. Paul. 
The immense diligence and constructive power with which 
German theologians especially have sought to perform this feat 
have failed to convince us that St. Paul had the remotest fore- 
cast of modern ideas upon the subject. At the most, these 
theologians do but reverse the dogmatic process of St. Paul, 
and get back, as near as may be, to the doctrine of Jesus, of 
which they seek to give us the modern equivalent in grand and 
laboured philosophic form. 

There is nothing more evident in St. Paul's epistles than that 
he was enthusiastically persuaded of the universalism of the 
religion of which he was the expounder. According to his 
mind this predicate belonged to it, because it placed the whole 
human race on an equal footing in the sight of God, and 
because it conferred its benefits on the Gentiles without requir- 
ing them first to become Jews. Before his conversion, the 
ground of his hostility to the religion of Jesus was that it took 
no account of Jewish privilege, and set those things aside on 
which Jewish privilege depended. And after embracing the 
new doctrine he did not forget this feature of it. The grandeur 
of the idea was probably one of those things in it by which it 
appealed to his mind, so as at once to attract and to repel him ; 
and he was far indeed from thinking that he had obscured or 
obliterated this aspect of Christianity by his dogma of the 
atonement. At a time when the supernatural idea connected 
with the person and work of Jesus gave no offence, and 
presented no difficulty to faith, there was nothing illogical in 
such a position. But had St. Paul lived at the present day, it 
is doubtful whether he could have proclaimed this doctrine 
with the same confidence in its universalistic character. No 
doctrine is fully entitled to that designation which does not 
appeal to the essential principles and instincts of human nature, 
and which cannot win its way to the hearts of men independent 
of authority, and assert for itself a place in the great system of 
human thought. We have endeavoured to show that by certain 
avenues of dialectic and of experience it is competent for man 
to rise, as Jesus did, to the conception of the Heavenly Father, 
who freely forgives our sins, and looks with benign and en- 
couraging eye upon our every effort to extricate ourselves from 
the toils of evil ; but it is confessedly impossible for man, 
except by special revelation, to rise to the other Pauline and 

2 c 



402 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

orthodox idea of God, as determined in his relations to man by 
the death upon the Cross of one in human form. This is a 
thought which can evidently be received only upon the authority 
of such a revelation ; and it is not easy to see how universalism 
can be predicated of this doctrine in an age like the present, 
when it is a thousand times more difficult to embrace a faith in 
the supernatural than it would be to submit to all the require- 
ments of the Mosaic law. The mere fact that the preacher of 
the gospel invites all men, without distinction, to partake of its 
benefits, does not make it universalistic. No religion, however 
exclusive and non-proselytizing, has refused to enrol converts 
on its own conditions. But universalism can be affirmed of a 
religion only when the condition it demands is the acceptance 
of truths which appeal to the human heart as eternally true and 
valid : which rest not upon doubtful or irrelevant speculations, 
nor upon an obsolete theory of the divine government ; but are 
involved or implied in the very constitution of our rational 
nature. Our conviction is that the doctrine of Jesus may justly- 
lay claim to this predicate of universalism, but only as enunciated 
by himself, and not as construed by St. Paul. By its strictly 
practical nature ; by its abstention from speculation and from 
the claim to inspiration ; by its bearing on the moral life, and by 
the fact that the evidence on which it rests is independent 
of a supernatural basis, " the religion of Jesus " may claim to be 
regarded as the absolute and universal religion. But the 
" Christian religion " as conceived and taught by St. Paul rested 
on the old, i.e., the naive, non-scientific theory of the universe, 
and having the supernatural as its presupposition, can retain 
its hold over those only who overlook that connection, or are 
content to separate what is permanent in it from what is 
transient, and who, like ourselves, find that the spiritual 
elements of Christianity have an absolute and independent 
value. We are not staggered in the judgment here expressed 
by the fact that St. Paul evidently regards universalism as a 
signature or note of his gospel. That claim in his da)- none 
would care to dispute. But it is only by the sacrifice in his 
doctrine of the supernatural which differentiates his teaching 
from that of Jesus that this claim can now be made good. 

The distinction here drawn between the religion of Jesus and 
the Pauline or Christian religion, was first, we believe, distinctly 
recognised by Lessing. But as stated by him, it was only a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 403 

surmise or divination, which could not be verified in the then 
existing condition of Biblical criticism ; whereas now a strong 
and growing presumption has been created in its favour by 
every advance which criticism has made since Lessing's day — 
and it is a distinction which commands our assent.^ We hold 
that, unconsciously and unintentionally, St. Paul broke or fell 
away from the simplicity and universalism of the doctrine of 
Jesus, in his desire to preserve, as far as possible, the thread of 
continuity between it and the older form of religion, as well as 
to magnify the significance of the person of Jesus, and to main- 
tain, at its initial intensky, his own sense of obligation to him. 
While, in his teaching as preserved by the synoptists, Jesus 
makes no reference to his own person, in the Pauline doctrine 
he becomes all in all : a place is assigned to him in the 
Christian consciousness which he never claims for himself ; a 
virtue is ascribed to his work in the soteriological process which 
did not belong to it ; and the spirit of his doctrine is clothed in 
a form which, by identifying it with his person, might seem to 
compensate for the withdrawal of his personal presence, and 
also render his doctrine more palpable and level to ordinary 
human apprehension. 

They who have taken hold of the Fatherhood of God, of the 
unchangeableness of the divine law, and of personal responsibility 
as taught by Jesus, and even by Paul himself, will not easily be 

* The surmise of Lessing has never, we believe, since his day, been lost 
sight of. One of the most eminent of living theologians has gone the length 
of saying that the simple doctrine of Jesus was "spoiled" by St. Paul's 
doctrine of the atonement. The writer of this volume takes this opportunity 
to state that the same idea forced itself upon him independently, at a time 
when he was comparatively little read in German theology, and when he was 
not aware that the distinction referred to had been drawn. It appeared to 
him that the soteriological doctrine of Jesus was complete in itself : at once 
more simple, more intelligible, and more satisfactory, than the elaborate 
dogmatic form into which it had been cast by St. Paul. Parenthetically, it 
may here be remarked that the true "Fall" in Christian doctrine lay, not ah 
a fanciful theologian (Thiersch), and others after him have maintained, 
between the apostolic and the post-apostolic age, but between Jesus himself 
and his apostles ; or, according to what has just been said, between the religion 
of Jesus, and the Christian religion. This fall consisted in the conversion of 
the simple, practical doctrine of Jesus into the complex dogma of St. Paul. 
by which the whole subsequent development of Christian theology has been 
determined. 



404 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

indoctrinated with the idea of atonement, by which the Apostle 
effected this conversion of the religion of Jesus into the Chris- 
tian religion. The metamorphosis which the religion of Jesus 
thus underwent was very great, if not radical. In the synoptists, 
Jesus only appears to instruct men, by word and by example, 
to redeem or deliver themselves from the power of evil ; to 
whom therefore our gratitude and veneration are tempered by 
the consideration that, after all, he was but a member of a long 
prophetic chain, the product of a great religious movement 
going before, as well as a factor in the continuance and 
acceleration of that movement. But wi St. Paul's epistles he 
is presented as the author of a redemption, of which we become 
partakers only by faith in him, i.e., by means of some sub- 
jective relation to him, or by a certain ethical disposition, 
consisting in love to him and in imitation of his manner of 
life. A permanent and absolute significance is thus given in 
the religious life of man to the person of Jesus. By a single 
stroke his autosoteric doctrine is converted into one that is 
heterosoteric ; and our historical dependence on his teaching 
and example, into a metaphysical dependence on his work and 
person. That happy change in the sinner's state which, accord- 
ing to the doctrine of Jesus, is effected by the conception of 
divine love, animating and exhilarating the soul in its conflict 
with evil, is, according to St. Paul, accomplished by divine 
grace, considered as an energy or potency flowing from the 
person of Christ, and called into operation by faith in him, so 
as to act directly or magically on the human will. If, accord- 
ing to the Apostle's view, we can, in any sense, be said to save 
ourselves, it is by believing on Christ, by copying his example, 
and in this way qualifying ourselves to partake of his redemp- 
tion ; so that human deliverance from evil is seen, in a sense, 
to be the joint work of Jesus and of the sinner himself — a 
process partly autosoteric and partly heterosoteric ; and the 
whole subject becomes involved, as theologians well know, in 
inextricable confusion, giving occasion to innumerable contro- 
versies in the Church, which do not seem to admit of settlement, 
and ever reappear in new forms. 

The confusion in St. Paul's scheme of doctrine, which we 
here allege, and for the existence of which we ma}' take these 
controversies to be the objective evidence, ma}- be best 
accounted for, we sav, bv the fact that his doctrine is a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 405 

compromise between the autosoteric and the heterosoteric 
point of view. Conspicuous in his writings there is a wavering 
between the two forms of doctrine ; an effort to qualify, by 
rationalizing, the magical influence of Christ, without seeming 
to deprive him of the sole glory and credit of man's salvation. 
When the Apostle presses upon his readers the study of the 
example of Christ, the sympathetic contemplation of Christ 
crucified, manifestly set forth by the preached word for this 
very purpose, it appears as if he trusted that this contemplation 
would operate upon the rational and receptive nature of man, 
and contribute to his emancipation from evil, and his edification 
in the moral life. But when he says, on the other hand, " I 
live, and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me," we may call this 
a mystical, coming near to a magical, view of the believer's life: 
a view of it which is further confirmed by the representation of 
a spirit proceeding from Christ, and taking daemonic possession 
of the believer ; for this representation, if more fully carried out 
in the fourth Gospel, is not foreign to St. Paul's mode of 
thinking >'Rom. viii. 11, 1 Cor. iii. t6). 

In passing, we pause here to observe that it was a true 
instinct which, probably from the earliest ages of the world, led 
men to the thought that sacrifice and mediation of some sort 
were requisite to place the relation of men to God on its proper 
footing. This thought was inherited by St. Paul from the 
fathers ; but he also shared in a tendency, which the history of 
religions shows to have been frequently exemplified in the 
ethnic religions of the world — viz., to conceive of the mediating 
function as concentrated in some one individual, supposed to 
be participant both of the human and the divine nature. The 
true idea, which is at once more consonant to the teaching of 
Jesus, and to which modern thought inclines, is that this 
function belongs to the God in man ; to that divine principle 
which resides in even* individual ; by surrendering himself to 
whose promptings all the discordant elements of his nature are 
controlled, and he is brought into the true reciprocal relation to 
God, so as to be able to say from the heart, " Not my will, but 
Thine be done." Looked at from this point of view, the 
difference between the religion of Jesus and the religion of St. 
Paul — between Christianity as a natural and as a supernatural 
system — may seem to be not very great, theoretical rather than 
practical. But be this as it may, it is necessary that the true 



406 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

theory should be recognized, in order to remove all ground of 
offence to scientific thought, and also to do away with the 
Judaic or passive habit of mind in the matter of religion. 

To explain to himself and to others how the sufferings of 
the Messiah could atone for the sins of men, the Apostle 
adopted an idea for which he was indebted partly to a 
Hellenistic source, and partly to the current synagogal theology. 
According to the latter, it was a matter of indifference by 
whom the penalty of sin was borne, whether by the sinner 
himself or by some one more or less related to him ; the law 
was satisfied — the sin was expiated provided the penalty was 
borne. Then there was the Hellenistic idea of an archetypal 
man — a second Adam, or second head of the human family ; 
of one in whom the idea of humanity was realized, between 
whom and the human race there was such solidarity that he 
could represent it before God. Obviously, the kinship between 
these two ideas was such that the one could be incorporated 
with the other ; and the result was that Christ, as the archetypal 
man or second Adam, could expiate the sins of the race. 
Whether the assumptions thus made are or are not satisfactory 
to the critical modern mind is of no consequence. Enough 
that they commended themselves to the Apostle's mind. To 
him they seemed to afford a probable or rational justification 
of the doctrine of the Atonement. He therefore adopted and 
made use of them to explain and recommend that doctrine to 
his converts. 

Be it observed that this idea of the second Adam was not, 
as Mr. Arnold would have us think, a mere literary fancy or 
sportive allusion ; but a link of thought essential to the 
Apostle's dogma. There are many casual indications in his 
epistles that he considered it to be essentially pertinent to his 
system of thought ; and there is one such indication in 
particular, in his view of the resurrection of Christ as the 
guarantee of the resurrection of believers. It could be so only 
because of the solidarity between believers and Christ as their 
representative, corresponding to that which exists between the 
head and the members of the body, so that the head, in its 
ascent, can be conceived as drawing the body after it. "\Ye 
here assume that St. Paul's idea of Christ as the representative 
man was not a mere coincidence with Hellenistic thought, but 
was adopted by him from that source. For it has, we think, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 407 

been demonstrated by E. Pfleiderer (Philosophic dcs Heraklii) 
that the Apostle was well acquainted with Hellenistic thought, 
and even with its modes of expression. 

We have here met for the first time with an indication 
of Greek or Hellenistic influence upon the religious evolution 
which we have been tracing, and as this influence becomes 
more and more patent in the subsequent stages, we shall here 
pause to express our general views as to the place occupied 
by such influences in the evolution. We are not at all dis- 
posed to question the fact, or to depreciate the importance 
of Hellenism (in which a fusion had already taken place be- 
tween Greek and Jewish thought), considered as a factor in 
the evolution of Christian thought. On the contrary, we deem 
it to be an enhancement of the great position of Christianity, 
when it is shown that the two great branches of human 
thought — the Aryan and the Semitic, the Greek and the 
Jewish — coalesced in its growth. We imagine, however, 
that there is a tendency at present to overrate, as well as 
to antedate, the part which the former played in the process. 
And our appreciation of the service which Greek or Hellenistic 
thought has rendered is qualified by the following considera- 
tions : — 

(1) It does not appear to have influenced the genesis of 
Christianity. There is, no doubt, a difficulty in conceiving 
how the Founder of our faith could altogether have escaped 
the touch of Greek thought, educated as he was in the land 
of Galilee, amid a mixed population of Greeks and Jews. 
There, as elsewhere in the countries overrun by Alexander, 
Greek influences had been more or less at work for more 
than two centuries. And it is barely conceivable that there 
could have been a corner of the land, or an interior circle in 
it, so isolated, so shut off from Greek thought, as not to have 
felt its power. But what we say is, that in the teaching 
of Jesus there is no clear indication of distinctively Greek 
ideas — nothing which might not have been evolved from 
Jewish thought alone. The evangelical idea, which was the 
centre of His doctrine, while it was a revolt against the vulgar 
Pharisaism of the day, was the development, or fulfilment, 
of the higher or prophetic mind of Israel. And it is evident 
that he did not, and indeed could not have drawn the idea 
from Greek inspiration. Not only had the Greek mind not 



408 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

been able to rise to the height of the idea, but it had, to all 
appearance, missed and passed it by. The highest water- 
mark of Greek thought in that direction is probably to be 
seen in that idea of the Stoics, that there is no such thing as 
forgiveness for past failures, but only amendment for the 
future. We are not blind to the fact, that this doctrinal 
position of the Stoics displays a certain depth of insight into 
the process of the spiritual life ; but the undue emphasis which 
it lays on the legal aspect of the process is a stray or mis- 
leading note in it, and it falls far short of the deeper insight 
of Jesus, viz., that there is a moment in the spiritual life at 
which, while the physical and social penalties of sin remain, 
its oppressive and condemning power falls like a burden from 
the conscience ; and the remembrance of past failure, from 
being a drag, becomes a stimulus to the upward progress. 
That is a moment or crisis in the life of w r hich thousands of 
Christians have been distinctly conscious, and of which Bunyan 
gives a striking picture in his dream. And all who prelimin- 
arily — after the manner of the educative process — accept of 
this fact on the testimony of Jesus, and honestly (Luke viii. I 5 } 
endeavour to prove and verify it in their own case, are His 
true followers. It is scarcely necessary to add here, that if 
the distinctive teaching of Jesus could not be derived from 
his acquaintance with the Stoic thought, still less could it 
be derived from the rival Greek school of practical philosophy, 
viz., the Epicurean. Nothing can be less in harmony with 
the ideal, practical doctrine of Jesus, than the " long-sighted 
prudence which contents itself with moderate and safe enjoy- 
ment," and that disbelief in providence inculcated by Epi- 
curus. 

(2) If Greek thought had nothing to do with the genesis of 
Christianity, there can be no doubt, that in the construction of 
the dogma St. Paul was indebted in the second degree to Greek 
or Hellenistic speculation. Whether he derived aid directly 
from acquaintance with Greek and Hellenistic literature, or 
indirectly from the elements of Greek or Hellenistic thought 
floating at large in the intellectual atmosphere, matters not. 
To judge from abstract considerations, it is as improbable that 
St. Paul could have remained uninfluenced by Greek thought, as 
that he was uninfluenced by the teaching and the details of the 
life of Jesus. A man of intellect so piercing could not shut his 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 409 

mind against an influence with which he could not but come 
in contact in his native Tarsus and in his journeyings up 
and down the civilized, largely Hellenized world. Professor 
MahafTy {Greek Life and Thought) from his purely historical 
point of view, speaks of the Greek (Stoic) colour and training of 
St. Paul's mind, and says that there is " no mistaking " the in- 
fluence upon him of Greek thought. In proof of this, he singles 
out the splendid period in 2 Cor. vi., where the contrasts pre- 
sented by the Christian life are described by the Apostle in 
terms borrowed from the Stoic formulae of the moral life. The 
Apostle may indeed have only taken a suggestion from that 
source by way of delineating his own experience of the Chris- 
tian life. But if this does not affect the substance of his 
thought, it shows at least that he was not unacquainted with 
Stoic doctrine. And this is all the more likely, inasmuch as 
Tarsus, the Apostle's birth-place, was one of the chief seats of 
Stoic philosophy. So too, it has been demonstrated, we think, 
by E. Pfleiderer {Philosophic des Heraklit, pp. 295, etc.), that in 
2 Cor. v. 1-9 the Apostle must have had the Hellenistic Book 
of Wisdom directly in his view : and that there are other pass- 
ages in his epistles which show unmistakable traces of his 
acquaintance with this book, in which elements of Greek and 
Jewish thought had already coalesced. It may no doubt be 
said that Greek elements of thought may have exerted an 
influence upon him without his being conscious of it. But it is 
not improbable that E. Pfleiderer may have hit upon an impor- 
tant fact as throwing light upon the dogmatic process, when he 
suggests, that in Phil. ii. 6-1 1- — a passage in which St. Paul's 
Christological doctrine advances a step forward, and takes a 
higher flight than elsewhere in his epistles (if perhaps 2 Cor. 
viii. 9 be excepted) — the Apostle had a remarkable specula- 
tion of Heraklitus directly in view. The number of centuries 
which intervened between the philosopher and the Apostle does 
not shake the value or impair the probability of this sugges- 
tion ; for the authority of Heraklitus, as a great master in 
philosophy, seems to have revived in that late or Hellenistic age, 
and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Paul may have been 
acquainted with his writings. Now, in his style of mystical, 
theosophic speculation, Heraklitus imagines that the Absolute 
may divest Himself of His high estate : may descend to a lower 
sphere of existence, and subject Himself to suffering and even 



410 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

to death: and having thus given proof of His virtue, may ascend 
in triumph to His original state. The parallel here to the 
passage in the Epistle to the Philippians is so close and striking 
that it can hardly be accidental, and renders probable the 
suggestion of a genetic connection. 

(3) In a former section of this discussion, it was remarked 
that dogma proper was absent from the Old Testament ; and if, 
for the reasons then given, this be admitted, it might be 
supposed that the dogmatizing or speculative tendency which 
appears in the New Testament was, as Dr. Hatch (Hibbert 
Lecture, 1888) endeavours to show, mainly owing to contact 
with the speculative philosophy of Greece. But it seems to us 
that there is something of exaggeration in this view. It is true 
that Greek habits of thought did ere long become an important 
factor in the construction of the dogmatic system ; but in the 
initial stage even of this process the speculative tendency 
was spontaneous and independent, called forth by the singular 
situation in which the first disciples found themselves placed by 
the death of their Master, and by their belief in his Messiah- 
ship and resurrection. The dogma of the atonement, which 
was the starting point of the whole system, is really neither 
more nor less than an unverifiable speculation or hypothesis in 
regard to the nature and purpose of the death of the Messiah. 
It suggested or offered itself to the disciples as an explanation 
at once of the ignominious death of one whom they regarded as 
the promised Messiah, and of the great spiritual change which 
had passed upon themselves. And with this explanation 
upon their minds, they went forth to inculcate the faith of the 
atonement as the means of producing the same change in the 
minds of others. That is to say, the belief in the atonement, 
which was the effect produced on the minds of the first disciples 
by their own great spiritual experience, became, in the case 
of their converts, the cause of a like experience. And in 
passing we may remark, that this is the ultimate explanation of 
the historical fact referred to by Dr. Hatch, that from the end 
of the second century onwards — by which time the forward 
impulse given to Christianity by the contagious and assimilative 
power of the new life was exhausted — attention was turned to 
the creed rather than to the conduct, and that the intellectual 
rather than the moral element became the basis of union among its 
adherents. Moreover, it is evident that a speculation at once 



the: christian religion. 411 

so vague and so momentous as that of the atonement could not 
fail to quicken the speculative tendency generally, and, propria 
motu, to call for further definition, which it received in the first 
instance at the hands of St. Paul, and in which the influence 
of Greek philosophy gradually made itself more and more felt 
till it culminated in the fourth Gospel. 

(4) The definition which Paul gave, as we have just seen, 
to the original (Jewish-Christian) form of the atonement, by 
which its incidence was universalized, may be traced either 
directly to the universalistic tendency of the doctrine of Jesus, 
or indirectly to the Apostle's contact with Greek (Stoic) 
philosophy, in which the same tendency had made its appear- 
ance. Probably both may have co-operated to influence 
the Apostle's thought. And this leads us to remark, that 
wherever Greek influence is apparent in the dogmatic presenta- 
tion, we find in general that there was between the Greek 
thought and the thought of Jesus a certain kinship, which 
renders it probable that both contributed to the formation of 
the dogma. And it will be found, as we proceed, that the 
unalterable bent given to the religious consciousness by the 
personality and teaching of Jesus exercised a controlling 
influence in the selection or rejection by the Church of those 
elements, whether of Greek or of Jewish origin, which it sought 
to incorporate with the growing dogma ; and this same bent it 
was which kept development upon the line of what in the end 
prevailed as orthodoxy. 

(5) According to Jewish notions, the perfect man was he 
who fulfilled the requirements of the statutory law, ceremonial 
or moral. The man who did so was said to fulfil all righteous- 
ness (Matth. iii. 15). But according to Greek notions, he was 
the perfect or ideal man who lived or acted up to the inner 
law of his being. This latter notion was involved in that 
saying of Jesus, " The kingdom of God is within you," and 
also in that other, that the righteousness of God surpassed 
that which consisted in the fulfilment of statutory law (Matth. 
v. 20). But it was through the Greek conception of the ideal 
man that these sayings of Jesus laid hold of the mind of 
Paul, or at least were explicated by him. The Apostle 
recognized the Greek notion as the higher of the two, and 
he proceeded to exalt the Christ, by representing him as the 
embodiment of the human ideal. The ideal Christ supplanted 



412 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

in the mind of the Apostle the historical Jesus, so that he 
was content to know nothing of Christ after the flesh. And 
as the notion of human perfection derived from Greek 
philosophy was embodied in Christ by St. Paul, so we shall 
yet see that the Logos-idea was derived from the same source 
and embodied in Christ by the fourth Evangelist. Christ thus 
became at once the ideal man, or second Adam, and the 
Lord from heaven (i Cor. xv. 47). And it is from this 
point of view that we may best see how much Christianity 
in its dogmatic form was indebted to Greek philosophy. 






CHAPTER XVI. 

PAULINE DOGMA AS INVOLVED IN THAT OF ATONEMENT. 

LEAVING these general remarks on the influence of Greek 
thought, we proceed to trace the logical sequence of the 
doctrine of the atonement. This doctrine, which has already 
occupied our attention, we regard as not only the centre 
round which the entire dogmatic construction revolves, but 
also as the point from which it starts. We hold that the 
process by which the religion of Jesus was converted by the 
Apostle into the Christian religion commenced from this 
point rather than from the belief in the resurrection, because 
it is conceivable that the latter might have been regarded 
merely as a divine confirmation, or historical authentication, 
of the teaching of Jesus, and the dogma might never have 
advanced beyond this point — that is to say, that the remis- 
sion of sins might simply have been " preached in the name 
of Jesus " — a phraseology which we have already found to 
have been usual in the earliest days of the Church, but which 
falls far short of the dogmatic position. In saying, however, 
that the dogma took its start from the Apostle's faith in the 
atonement, we do not mean that it took shape in his mind 
as a logical deduction from that faith ; but that for him, with 
his Jewish ideas and modes of reasoning, it was inchoate or 
germinally present therein. 

In the first place, the atonement involved a belief that the 
Messiah, by whom it was offered, was superhuman ; akin by 
nature to the divine. Whether or not it be the case, as some 
have insisted that, according to Jewish belief, the Messiah 
behoved to be divine, certainly the conception or estimate of 
the Messianic rank and position of Jesus must have been 



4 14 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

immensely heightened when he was regarded as Redeemer : 
as having, by his death, effected an alteration in the religious 
relation, and set free the love of God to flow forth toward His 
creatures. In St. Paul's epistles he is presented as something 
more than human ; as not only made of the seed of David, 
according to the flesh, but as declared, or determined to be, 
" Son of God, with power, according to the spirit of holiness, 
by the resurrection from the dead " — a mode of speaking from 
which might be gathered that the relation between the Father 
and the Son was ethical only, though it tends, as it could hardly 
fail of doing, by the mere force of speech, to assume the 
character of a metaphysical relation. Hence we find that the 
Apostle uniformly calls him " Lord," the name which in the 
Old Testament is kept sacred to God alone ; and in one 
passage the Apostle seems to go so far as to call him " God 
over all," though this rendering is doubtful, and it is every- 
where manifest that the Apostle does not overlook the fact of 
a certain subordination of the one sharer of the divine nature 
to the other. 

The two ideas now, of an archetypal man, and of a being so 
akin to God as to be entitled to a divine appellation, and yet, 
in some indefinite sense, distinct from the Father of all, were 
common in Hellenistic speculation, and not unknown in the 
theology of the synagogue, and were applied by the Apostle 
to Jesus as postulated by the redemptive function ascribed to 
him. St. Paul saw in him a union of the divine and human 
natures, and to his practical mind that union involved a 
mystery which he simply accepted, because it seemed essential 
to the atonement ; but he made no attempt to account for it. 
And we may here observe that, to a large school of modern 
theologians, this position of the Apostle recommends itself by 
its very indistinctness. They speak of the person of Jesus as 
being the meeting place or intersecting point of the divine and 
human natures; which and other like forms of expression 
convey no certain meaning, but recommend themselves to this 
class of theologians by reason of their very vagueness. It was 
otherwise with the early Christians of the same age as St. Paul 
and of the age succeeding. To them this union of the two 
natures in the person of Jesus presented a problem which called 
forth various attempts to explain it, though none of them may 
be satisfactory to the critical judgment. Leaving out of view 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 4 I 5 

the extreme docetic doctrine, there is that of the apocryphal 
Gospels, and perhaps that of St. Mark, that the Spirit of God 
descended upon the man Jesus at his baptism, so as to endue 
him with divine power and wisdom, suggestive of an inspiration 
such as the prophets enjoyed, but of a higher and unintermittent 
kind, and of a virtue superadded to his humanity. Then there 
is that of his generation by the Holy Ghost, in the womb of 
the Virgin Mary, which may have been suggested by many 
incidents in heathen mythology, or by well-known expressions 
in the Old Testament. This is the explanation of the synoptic 
Gospels, which has been adopted and retained to this day by 
the orthodox Churches. But the highly speculative and creative 
mind of the fourth Evangelist could not rest without making 
an attempt to fix, in a unique, original, and distinctive way the 
exact relation in which Jesus stood to God, and to determine 
his place in the scale of universal being. Not satisfied with 
styling him the Son of God, like St. Paul, he calls him the 
" only begotten Son " of God — i.e., not created nor adopted, but 
standing in a unique relation to God, specifically different from 
that of all God's other rational and spiritual offspring. But 
even this designation was too indefinite to satisfy the Evan- 
gelist ; for it was figurative, borrowed from or suggested by a 
simply human relationship, which was not archetypal, and 
therefore could not properly shadow forth that peculiar relation 
which he conceived to exist between God and man in the 
person of Jesus Christ ; and hence he seeks a nearer and closer 
determination of this relation, which he finds, as we shall after- 
wards see, in the application to it of the Logos-idea — an idea 
which was at once a gift of Greek philosophy, and led up to 
by previous developments of thought in the Church. 

Whatever may have been the case with the Evangelists, the 
interest in speculative or theoretic completeness was very weak 
in the mind of St Paul. It was a practical necessity which led 
him and the Church in its first stage generally to exalt the 
person of Jesus to the utmost. The belief that the Messiah 
had taken upon him the sins of men, and by the suffering of 
death had expiated their guilt, rendered him an object to the 
Apostle of the highest veneration and the most absolute devo- 
tion. The Apostle could not but feel that one to whom honour 
and homage, substantially divine, were due, must be divine ; 
and that that homage, which could not be withheld from him, 



41 6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

would trench upon the divine prerogative, unless he was in 
some sense, and to some extent, partaker of the divine nature ; 
that but for this a significance would be lent to his person 
which would be distracting to the monotheistic sentiment. For 
this distraction is often felt to this day by Christian men, not- 
withstanding all that has been done to exalt and deify the 
person of Christ. The service rendered to humanity by atone- 
ment and redemption must have been felt by the Apostle to be 
too great for any but a being akin to God to render ; to be 
greater indeed than any other which men were accustomed to 
trace even to God. For what was life itself and all its enjoy- 
ments compared with deliverance from that load of sin, which, 
to the awakened conscience, makes life intolerable ; from the 
deep-felt schism within the soul, and from the dreaded hostility 
of the unseen power. 

That the long-promised Messiah should, as Paul believed, 
have been commissioned to render a service to man so much 
greater than anything which had been expected of him, to 
effect such a massive and transcendent revolution in the 
religious relation, and that too at such a cost of suffering to 
himself, could not but immeasurably enhance the conception 
which had been hitherto entertained of the Messiah, and seem 
to justify the application to him of many mysterious and 
enigmatical sayings of the Old Testament, of which it was 
difficult to say to what they referred, whether to God or to 
some other being of a godlike nature. The theological idea 
was thus set in motion, and the exaltation of the person of the 
Messiah could hardly stop at any point short of what would 
appear to be an infraction of the monotheistic principle. Having 
ceased to regard him as a mere man, the Apostle could not 
but invest him with attributes which brought him near to 
divinity. His feelings of gratitude and obligation would allow 
no rest to his imagination at any point sensibly short of this. 
In a word, the thought of atonement, thus associated by him 
with the person of Jesus, was of such a nature that he and all 
who entertained it were under the necessity either of advancing 
till they arrived at this point, or of again receding from it, and 
falling back to the idea of the pure humanity. The former 
alternative admitted of a great development, and defined itself 
as that of orthodoxy. The latter was probably fallen into by 
many of the Jewish Christians, who gradually sank back into a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 4 I 7 

scct, not separated by any distinctive principle from the rest 
of their countrymen, to disappear at last from record, because 
they could not follow the catholic development of the Christo- 
logical doctrine inaugurated by St. Paul. Besides many other 
traces of this process, which history has preserved, there is some 
indication of such a halt in the Epistle of St. James, the Judaeo- 
Christian origin of which cannot be doubted : and which is 
remarkable for the very inconspicuous significance assigned in 
it to the person of Jesus, and also for its polemic against the 
doctrine of faith, and against the position which that doctrine 
necessarily occupies in Pauline or orthodox theology. 

We have here arrived at a point at which we may direct atten- 
tion to what may be called the motive principle of the dogmatic 
development. In his Apologia, Newman, speaking of his transi- 
tion period, makes the following confession : " The feeling grows 
upon me that the reason for which I believe as much as our 
own system (the Anglican) teaches, must lead me to believe 
more, and that not to believe more was to fall back into 
scepticism." Now this very feeling of propulsion, this necessity 
for a consistent and exhaustive development of the germinal 
idea, must have prevailed, less consciously, it may be, yet power- 
fully, in the mind of the early Church. Beginning with the belief 
in the Messiahship, the atonement and resurrection of Jesus, it 
could not stop short till it had fixed his position at the very 
highest, and made him a member of the divine college. That 
section of the Juda±o-Christian Church which, in deference to 
the inherited monotheistic principle, stopped short on the way 
to this point, fell back into Ebionitism, and finally ceased to be 
Christian in any recognized sense. This, at least, is our con- 
struction, and we think the likeliest, of this dimly seen pheno- 
menon. A forward movement was of the very essence of the 
dogmatic principle : an intrinsic necessity. The belief of so 
much compelled to the belief of more. To pause in the move- 
ment, or to hesitate in accepting the consequences of a step 
already taken, even to question the truth of an)- narrative 
which illustrated or magnified the powers of Jesus, was enough 
to open the door to scepticism, and to shake the hold of that 
which was already attained. " All or nothing " was the alterna- 
tive presented to the early Church. And the consciousness of 
this, more or less distinct, operated all through the dogmatic 
development. History has many illustrations to show of a like 

2 D 



41 8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

process, the most conspicuous of which at the present clay is to 
be found in the operation of the Protestant principle of free 
inquiry, which must be either carried out in its integrity or 
entirely abandoned. 

We cannot refrain here from observing that the modern or 
mediating school of theologians in this country, while they 
shrink from denying the divinity of Christ, and the doctrines of 
atonement and inspiration, yet do not hesitate to go as far, short 
of this, as they possibly can. They do not seem to be aware 
that the citadel of orthodoxy, when deprived by such tactics of 
its outposts and bulwarks, is left in an isolated and defenceless 
position ; that these outworks were thrown up by the early 
Church because it instinctively, if unconsciously, felt them to be 
essential to the safety of the citadel itself; and that, after all 
that can be said to the contrary, the true and best working 
motto for the orthodox apologist may be that of " all or 
nothing"; and his most defensible position that of verbal in- 
spiration. 

Passing now to the anthropological department of the Pauline 
theology, we observe that the natural condition of the human 
subject, z>., his condition apart from faith in Christ, is therein 
made to correspond with the function of Christ as Redeemer : 
or to be such, so to speak, as to make room for the exercise of 
that function. Man is conceived of, or represented, as so con- 
stituted by nature, or so formed by habit, as to stand in need of 
redemption ; as unable to redeem himself, but yet as capable of 
being redeemed by Christ. In other words, the natural condi- 
tion of humanity is such as to supply a raison d'etre for the 
atonement. This is as much as to say that the atonement 
determines the anthropology of the Apostle no less than his 
Christology. He was predisposed to adopt a certain view on 
this subject, partly by his own religious experience both before 
and after his conversion, and partly by the opinions with respect 
to it which were current in the Jewish schools of theology. All 
the Apostle's endeavours to deliver himself from the oppressive 
sense of guilt and to reach the higher forms of righteousness 
had been in vain, though he had engaged in those endeavours 
with all the intensity of his nature ; and this experience seemed 
to him to be a proof of the natural impotency of man : to 
postulate the help of a higher power, which he conceived of 
as derived from the atonement offered to God, and as the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 4 I 9 

necessary foundation or preliminary to all effectual effort 
towards a better life on the part of man, and also as an ex- 
planation of that better success which attended his own efforts 
after he had come under the influence of Jesus. To account for 
that vexatious impotency, for that strange inability to approach 
the ideal of one's nature, he accentuated, or put a new meaning 
into the Mosaic narrative of the Fall, and drew from it, or put 
into it, the doctrine of original sin and of human depravity, 
while he threw into the background, or altogether ignored the 
idea of human liberty, which had been so emphatically, though 
not explicitly, presupposed in the teaching of Jesus. 

It used to be said that Paul was the first who found such a 
meaning in the Old Testament narrative, and that the narra- 
tive itself contained a prophecy or early anticipation of the 
Apostle's doctrine, and was therefore divinely corroborative of 
it. But recent investigation has clearly shown that the 
Apostle's view of the sin of Adam, and of its effects, is not 
peculiar to him, but in a great measure derived by him from 
the teaching of the synagogue. The tendency towards evil 
had, according to that teaching, existed by nature in the human 
subject ; but it was only in consequence of Adam's sin that it 
had gained a new and well-nigh irresistible supremacy over the 
tendency to good. (See Weber's Altsynagogale Theologie.) 

This doctrine was merely reproduced in sharpened form by 
St. Paul, and incorporated into his anthropological system. 
It is an instance to prove that he construed his own experience, 
and sought to determine its connection with the death of Jesus, 
by means of those current theological ideas with which his 
mind was saturated. According to him no true liberty can be 
predicated of man in his natural state : it is an endowment 
which man has lost by the primeval fall, in which the whole 
race participated, in the person of its progenitor and repre- 
sentative. What is new in the Apostle's doctrine is that this 
liberty has been regained for men by the redemption purchased 
by Christ, who is conceived of as the second Adam, or head 
and representative of a new and spiritual election. The power 
and liberty to do good is the distinction of those who obey the 
call of the gospel, which the Apostle describes as a call into the 
glorious liberty of the children of God, of a restored humanity. 
"As by one man's disobedience, many (i.e., all) were made 
sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made 



42 O THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

righteous." As humanity fell from the state of innocence and 
liberty in the person of its first head, or representative, so, by 
the grace of God, Christ became its second head, that in him 
Paradise might be regained, and all restored to their first estate 
on condition of faith in him. 

We repeat here what has already been said, that we cannot 
listen for a moment to the notion of a great critic, that Paul 
did not really mean what he said in these representations of 
the fall and the restoration of man, or that they are merely 
figurative and literary expressions thrown out at a subject or 
fact imperfectly apprehended. Certain facts there are, no 
doubt, underlying the Apostle's views, such as those of the 
frailty of individual man, and the solidarity of the race, but 
the critic is not entitled to make use of such facts as if they 
exhausted the meaning of the Apostle. The plain interpre- 
tation goes much beyond such facts, and is also the true one ; 
and we believe that the Apostle's language is seriously intended 
to bring out the actual function which Jesus discharged, and 
the relation which he occupied to the human family. That his 
language is not playfully and figuratively but seriously meant 
is fully borne out by its concordance with current thought, and 
also by his sweeping and pitiless denunciations of human 
depravity in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and 
elsewhere. The description of human depravity, in connection 
with the worship of idols, which is given in the first chapter of 
Romans, resembles so curiously, and in some points almost so 
verbally, the description of it in the 14th chapter of the Hel- 
lenistic (apocryphal) Book of Wisdom, that it helps to bear out 
what has already been suggested as to the Apostle's acquaint- 
ance with Hellenistic literature. But there is an exaggeration 
and one-sidedness in these descriptions, which we do not meet 
with in the teaching of Jesus. 

The latter presupposes a seed of goodness in man, which 
needs only to be quickened ; a spirit of goodness to which appeal 
may be made. And according to the best observation this is 
the true view. We may not be able to tell whether man has 
sprung from a creature in which there was no God-conscious- 
ness, for the beginning as well as the end of things is shrouded 
in deep obscurity. But wherever that consciousness has arisen, 
we hold that there has been good as well as evil in man. The 
good may not be very deep, or it ma}' lie too deep, but still it 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIQION. 421 

is there ; it may be little able to stand the test of temptation, 
but still it is there ; between it and the most fearful evil there 
may be but a step, but still it is there ; and if Paul did not 
believe this, certainly Jesus did. The ideal humanity never 
existed as a reality for so much as a moment in the primeval 
state, but it exists as an inextinguishable thought in the heart 
of man, as the divine germ in his nature, as the promise and 
possibility of a divine life yet to be ; and the divine purpose is 
that the good which is in man shall rise from the possible to 
the actual in him. 

This is the view of man's natural state implied in the teaching 
of Jesus, and, to some extent, it seems to be implied also in the 
doctrine of Paul as well, who, even when he speaks of the soul as 
dead in sin, does not suppose it to be so dead, but that it may 
hear the call to awake to righteousness (1 Cor. xv. 34, Eph. 
v. 14). But the Apostle only seems to make this concession so 
far as may be necessary in obedience to undeniable and palpable 
facts, and because it is a postulate of the very preaching of the 
gospel, which he makes no attempt to reconcile with his general 
doctrine, and which, in fact, is irreconcilable with it. In those 
passages in which he paves the way and lays the ground for his 
dogmatic and heterosoteric views, he speaks as if men were 
wholly given up to vile affections, and had entirely lost the 
power of seeking or doing any good thing. 

If it be said that such passages are written for a " polemical 
purpose," the reply is, that with them the whole structure of his 
dogma stands or falls. And whatever utterances of a contrary 
signification may be producible from the writings of the im- 
petuous, and sometimes not quite logical Apostle, there can be 
no doubt that the Augustinian and Lutheran, or rather Calvin- 
istic creeds, are the true expositions of the dogmatic views to 
which the Apostle was driven by his construction of the death 
of Jesus and of his own -unique experience. We call his views 
dogmatic because they were based on Jewish presuppositions 
which were not verifiable, though to himself they appeared to 
• be unchallengeable and of axiomatic certainty. The cir- 
cumstance that these presuppositions admitted of applica- 
tion to the facts of Christian consciousness, and that, being 
so applied, they gave to these latter a transcendent and 
mystical significance which seemed to justify and fall in with 
the Apostle's feelings of devout reverence for the person of 



42 2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Jesus, was enough to place them for him beyond the possibility 
of doubt. 

A strong presumption in favour of the view now given of 
the Apostle's anthropological doctrine may be seen in the fact, 
that those schools of theology which seek to soften his view of 
human impotency and depravity have always been obliged to 
tone down or abandon the heterosoteric aspects of his doctrine. 
And in imputing a fundamental inconsistency to his dogmatic 
structure, we do not feel that we make an improbable or pre- 
sumptuous suggestion. In such inconsistency we only see an 
example of what men of ardent genius are peculiarly apt to fall 
into ; an inconsistency between their theoretical and their prac- 
tical views, which are oftentimes wide apart from each other, 
especially where an element of mysticism comes in. In his 
endeavour to persuade and influence the minds of men, the 
Apostle necessarily presupposes that they enjoy a certain free- 
dom of action and a certain soundness of judgment in things 
spiritual; but in his endeavour to magnify the function and the 
work of Jesus, he is obliged polemically to take a view of 
human depravity which seems to deprive men of every vestige 
of freedom. So we have seen instances in our own day of 
men great in the literary world becoming so intent on a 
particular view of a subject, as unintentionally to be for the 
time oblivious of all nuances, sidelights, and qualifying con- 
siderations, and by excluding these from their field of vision to 
establish a foregone conclusion. The tendency this way is one 
main feature which distinguishes the literary from the scientific 
bent of mind. The history of literature has many instances to 
show of that one-sidedness which is lent to genius by its own 
intensity. 

Turning now to the soteriological doctrine of the xApostle, we 
observe that the salvation of the sinner was conceived of by 
him as having the atonement as its necessary presupposition, 
as depending indeed on the appropriation by the sinner of the 
merit of the atonement, while faith was the appropriating in- 
strument. In other words, the Apostle's great and distinctive 
doctrine of justification by faith alone was the logical, or, at 
least, the natural sequel of that other doctrine that the death of 
Jesus on the Cross was the sole and all-sufficient atonement for 
sin. In the Epistle to the Hebrews, and elsewhere in the New 
Testament, faith is spoken of in a very general way, as if it 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 423 

were a belief in the unseen in opposition to the materialistic 
view; but with Paul the object of the faith which justifies is the 
atonement of Jesus, and this is the use of the word to this day 
in strictly orthodox theology. It is a faith that the sins of the 
individual are atoned for by the sufferings of Jesus. The 
justifying power of this faith recommended itself to the mind of 
the Apostle, and proved itself to his satisfaction, because it 
seemed to be required in explanation of his own sudden and 
complete conversion : and, generally speaking, to secure the 
entire glory of man's salvation to God, who had provided the 
atonement ; to exclude all plea of merit on the part of man, and 
to lay a foundation for that humility which differentiates Chris- 
tian piety from that of the Jewish and Gentile world. The 
anxiety of the Apostle to secure such ends grew out of his own 
religious experience, for it appeared to him as if the grace 
of God had laid hold of him in the very height of his career of 
hostility to Jesus, so that his conversion was entirely due to an 
act of divine condescension, and the most he could claim for 
himself was that he had not " been disobedient to the heavenly 
vision," but had been a merely passive recipient of the grace of 
God. Nay, he would fain be more abject still, and strip him- 
self even of the possible or seeming merit of a passive 
obedience, and minimize to the utmost his own part in the 
work of salvation ; for there are some passages in which he 
comes near to imply that faith itself is a gift of God to the 
soul, a conviction impressed on the mind, as in his own case, by 
the presentation of irresistible evidence. That evidence in the 
case of Paul himself was the apparition of the risen Jesus, and 
in the case of other men the testimony of himself and other 
witnesses to the resurrection, or a witness of the Spirit of God 
to the soul. 

In its plain and obvious meaning, faith is an intellectual or 
at most a fiducial persuasion of the atoning virtue of the death 
of Jesus ; and to maintain that such a faith sufficed to procure 
justification for the sinner, fell in, as no other doctrine could, 
with the Apostle's purpose of claiming and asserting an ab- 
solute significance in the soteriological province for the person 
and work of Jesus, and of assigning to these a substantive, 
elemental, and exclusive value. But we cannot overlook the 
fact that this doctrine is hardly consistent with the inex- 
tinguishable idea of individual responsibility or with that other 



424 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

great doctrine which is common to the synoptic Jesus and to 
Paul himself, who states it early in his Epistle to the Romans 
as if he was anxious beforehand to guard the interests of 
practical religion against any inference prejudicial to them that 
might be drawn from his gospel : viz., that " God will render to 
every man according to his deeds " ; that He will acquit or con- 
demn men, not according as they have or have not acquired by 
their faith a lien or claim upon the store of another's merits, 
but according to their own manner of life ; and that in His 
judgment of men He will take account of acts and habits of 
mind or of that character in which they are registered, and not 
of faith apart from these ; in a word, administer the law of the 
spiritual harvest, which is the true flaming sword which guards 
the gates of Paradise. 

St. Paul would fain persuade himself that all who believed 
were children of the light and of the day (i Thess. v. 5), as 
might no doubt be the natural result, the likely consequence. 
But he could not conceal from himself that faith might exist in 
some sense and in some degree without exerting or being 
accompanied by any purifying influence on the life and charac- 
ter, and hence he seeks to escape or to correct the dangerous 
consequence of his one-sided and extreme doctrine of justifica- 
tion by faith alone by means of supplementary doctrines 
which are hardly consistent with it, if they be not even glar- 
ingly inconsistent with it. 

In many passages of his epistles it is implied, as well as 
insisted on by orthodox interpreters, that faith, the subjective 
factor by which the benefit of the atonement is appropriated, 
has a more extended signification than that of a mere intel- 
lectual, historical, or even fiducial persuasion which it natur- 
ally and primarily suggests ; and that it includes the adoption 
and practice of the soteriological method of Jesus, the accept- 
ance of him practically " as the leader and true ruler of life," so 
that he is the justified man, the Christian indeed, who takes 
Jesus as the " highest authority, the principal guide in all 
spiritual and moral matters," and enters sympathetically into 
his spirit and manner of life. But it has to be observed that, 
by this extension of the word " faith," the atonement, if it be 
not indeed rendered superfluous, both in its Godward and man- 
ward aspect, acquires efficacy only when the contemplation of it 
acts on the gratitude of man for the love displayed by it, or for 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 425 

the removal by its means of an otherwise insuperable obstacle 
presented by the righteousness of God to human salvation ; and 
thus becomes an incentive and stimulus to a new life. And if 
this be conceded, it is plain that the practice of the method is 
the main or determining element on which the efficacy of the 
atonement is made to hinge, and that, however the idea of 
human merit may be excluded, it is not by the fact of an 
atonement. 

There is thus little difficulty in criticizing the Pauline 
doctrine of faith, till it seems to dissolve in our hands ; but yet 
it is easy to conceive how the doctrine suggested itself to his 
mind and maintained its hold over his judgment. We have 
only to suppose the case of a man conscious of a process of 
moral deterioration and tormented by an accusing conscience ; 
or, as was the case with St. Paul before conversion, of a man 
thirsting for righteousness, but at the same time disabled and 
discouraged by the idea of a jealous, severe, and captious judge 
in heaven, from making the necessary change in his life ; it is 
easy to conceive that faith in an atonement made by a third 
person might at once pacify the conscience of such a man, and 
excite in him the feeling of a profound and enduring gratitude, 
and prove ever after a stimulus in the pursuit of righteousness. 
We can conceive also that such a man might thenceforth 
attribute the whole change that might subsequently pass upon 
him to the new persuasion or faith which had sprung up in his 
mind, and take no account of the preparatory steps in the pro- 
cess or of the previous mental state or disposition to which his 
faith had supplied the one additional element necessary to the 
vigorous and successful prosecution of the new life, and to the 
production of that inward satisfaction flowing from the con- 
sciousness of it. This oversight would, it is evident, be a 
mistake in theory which might involve grave consequences in 
practice. But we may take the opportunity of remarking that 
it would involve a mistake of an opposite kind, to say with Mr. 
T. H. Green (essay on " Faith "), that " the conflict between the 
law of the mind or reason and the law of sin in the members is 
the natural parent of the seemingly altered life that follows the 
acceptance of the gospel." In his essay on " Conversion " it is 
true, he remarks, and remarks well, "that the moral state which 
St. Paul describes in the seventh chapter of Romans is not a 
state of habitual indulgence in sin. It is a state in which the 



426 thi; natural history of 

« 

consciousness of sin is at its height, but the habit of wrong- 
doing at its minimum." In these words Mr. Green seems to 
imply that the heightened consciousness of sin was sufficient to 
carry the Apostle through the crisis of conversion without any 
breach in the continuity of his moral life. But to us the true 
view seems to be that the conflict to which that consciousness 
gave rise was necessary to his conversion as its preliminary pro- 
cess, and that the conflict could not have been brought to 
a successful issue except by the disclosure to his mind of the 
propitious character of God. This disclosure was " the natural 
parent " or proximate cause of the Apostle's conversion — the 
auxiliary ideal force, apart from which the law of the mind could 
never have gained the victory over the law of sin in his members. 
Were all men now in the same mental or spiritual condition 
as St. Paul was before his conversion, there would be little or 
no practical danger in the doctrine of justification by faith 
alone. The danger lay in the indiscriminate presentation of 
faith as a panacea for all moral evil. What seemed to the 
Apostle to represent his own case was believed by him at the 
first to hold good in the case of all others. And with this 
conviction he began, with the untempered vehemence of his 
ardent nature, to proclaim his doctrine. A well-known utter- 
ance of the young Melanchthon seems to show that he also was 
impressed for a time by a similar conviction. But though 
experience and observation soon taught the Apostle, as it did 
Melanchthon, that something more than an intellectual persua- 
sion of the evangelical doctrine was necessary for the renewal 
of the life ; yet owing to a certain want of mental flexibility, 
which is a general accompaniment of the enthusiastic and 
sanguine temperament, the Apostle, instead of qualifying or 
withdrawing his formula, retained its use : while by way of safe- 
guard, he extended the meaning of its terms so as to include 
devotion or self-surrender to the person and method of Jesus. 
By thus retaining his formula of the justifying power of faith, 
the Apostle was able, for controversial purposes, to present the 
gospel in strong contrast to the law and its works. But by 
the extension more or less of the principal term, his formula 
lost much or all of its paradoxical significance, inasmuch as 
faith, with such latitude of meaning, is presumptive, or, we may 
say, inclusive of the entire religious life. 

It is obvious that in the supposed case of a person aspiring 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 427 

to a better life, but oppressed by a sense of continual short- 
coming, the simple persuasion of divine goodness, as inculcated 
by Jesus, might accomplish all that a belief in atonement could 
accomplish : and that, if the interposed idea of atonement had 
any advantage, it lay in this, that this idea was so impressed 
on the mind of the ancient world that it was easy to connect it 
with the death of Jesus, and to see therein not merely an 
affecting illustration of his great ideal of humanity, but also a 
proof of divine love more palpable and moving than could be 
seen in any other token of it whatever. But, on the other 
hand, the belief that an atonement had been made by the Son 
of God, which had such a magical and beneficial effect on 
Paul's mental condition, as well as on the minds of thousands 
and millions since his day, and especially on such men as 
Augustine, Luther, and Whitfield, may have, and no doubt 
has had quite a relaxing, and even indurating effect on the 
minds of others, strangers to the purifying and paedagogic 
discipline of life. Indeed, we may admit that a belief in the 
one form of doctrine affords no better guarantee than a belief 
in the other for the moral elevation of the believer. It is only 
when a man is laid hold of by either the one or the other, so 
as to receive from it an impulse or encouragement to put forth 
an endeavour after the good life, that it is ethically safe. But 
there is this ground among others for preferring the doctrine of 
Jesus, that much as he laid stress on the essential love of God, 
as a source of forgiveness, he nowhere advances any doctrine 
parallel to that of Paul respecting the alone justifying power of 
faith, nor one equally liable to be misconstrued by ignorance, 
or to be perverted by the " casuistry of the passions." The 
authoritative and impressive announcement of Jesus respecting 
the forgiveness of sins was in reality the good tidings from 
which the gospel derived its name. But it was good tidings 
to those only who received it into " good and honest hearts," 
who sought first the kingdom of God, and hungered after 
righteousness. To those who used it as an anodyne to con- 
science, or derived from it a comfortable excuse for the 
relaxation of moral effort, it brought no good, but rather the 
reverse. In a word, the belief in this doctrine has no moral 
value, except in so far as it is resorted to in order to quicken 
aspiration, and to render practicable the pursuit of the ideal, 
under the sense of perpetual shortcoming. 



428 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

In his distinctive doctrine of justification by faith alone, St. 
Paul appears to have fallen into an error analogous to that of 
Socrates, of whom it has been said that he " resolved all virtue 
into knowledge or wisdom, and omitted to notice what is not 
less essential to virtue — viz., the proper condition of the 
emotions and desires, taking account only of the intellect." 
The Apostle made the whole method of salvation, the attain- 
ment of righteousness, to turn upon a special act of faith as its 
sole instrument, throwing for the time entirely out of sight the 
general state of mind, the soil in which such a faith takes root, 
and grows up, and, at the most, bringing in that state of mind 
apologetically, not as a preliminary or co-ordinate, but as a 
consequent of faith ; though experience and observation had 
told him, as it has told all ages of the Church since his day, 
that, by a sort of " mystery of iniquity," it is by no means an 
invariable consequent. There were representatives of the spirit 
of Antichrist then as now ; men who held the truth in un- 
righteousness ; who believed but did not obey the gospel 
of Christ ; whose existence and nature were explained in the 
First Epistle of St. John, by saying " they went out from us, 
because they were not of us," i.e., because their faith was not 
ours. Both John and Paul had had their attention riveted and 
arrested by the same, to them inexplicable phenomenon — a 
phenomenon quite inexplicable, so long as a paramount and 
exclusive position is assigned to faith as the subjective factor 
of religion. The fact was that the faith might be the same 
substantially in all cases, but the conditions might be different : 
it might be an essential element in a new life, without being the 
all-sufficient determinant of that life. St. Paul's error consisted 
in overlooking the peculiarities of his own experience, and de- 
ducing from it a doctrine of universal application. A certain 
conviction had dawned upon his mind, and seemed to produce 
that great moral elevation in him with which it was concurrent ; 
and, with the customary precipitancy of a grand enthusiasm, he 
laid it down as a universal dictum that the same persuasion was 
all-sufficient to produce the same effect, and to bring others 
into the same moral atmosphere with himself. 

To us it appears, then, that Paul not only laid down a 
soteriological theory differing in important respects from that 
laid down and exemplified by Jesus ; but also that he did not 
confine his deductive reasoning within the limits of that theory, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 429 

but sought to escape the dangerous consequences by partial 
departures from it. The historian just quoted says again of 
Socrates that, in spite of his theory, no man ever insisted more 
emphatically on the necessity of enjoining the control of the 
appetites and passions, of enforcing good habits, and the value 
of that state of the sentiments and emotions which such a 
course tended to form. And the example of Socrates, whose 
dialectic was certainly not inferior to that of Paul, may incline 
us to believe that the latter may have fallen more or less uncon- 
sciously into a like happy inconsistency ; that, in his eagerness 
to assert and exalt the power of faith in the soteriological 
process, he was betrayed into an exaggeration of statement, 
which could only be corrected by other statements amounting 
to a modification or withdrawal of his distinctive principle. 
That faith in divine goodness plays an essential part, both 
negative and positive, in the regeneration of the individual 
life, is as certain as a wide experience can make it ; but that 
it is the sole instrument of a sinner's justification, or that divine 
goodness has been manifested in the offering of an atonement for 
man's sin, are statements which may well be called in question, 
even though they may rest on the authority of St. Paul, and of 
what has been regarded as the orthodox Church in ancient and 
modern times. The truth seems to be that St. Paul, under the 
desire to controvert Jewish legalism and to exalt the person of 
Jesus, took up the ground that .faith in Jesus was the sole 
instrument of salvation, because this doctrine seemed to 
minimize to the utmost the part of man himself in the work 
of salvation, and left no room for propitiatory service. But 
that, on the other hand, under the influence of anxiety for the 
cause of religion and morality, he either used the word " faith " 
in the wider sense, which included the moral endeavour to form 
oneself on the pattern of Jesus, or simply enforced the practice 
of Christian graces as equally indispensable to salvation, without 
attempting to reconcile his different views on the subject. 

One of the great difficulties experienced in the first age of 
the Church was to set in a clear light the relation between the 
new doctrine and the old : between law and gospel, between 
faith and works, the question involved in all these being 
radically the same. St. Paul was no doubt profoundly con- 
vinced that law did not occupy the same place as it formerly 
did, or was supposed to occupy. Practically, he felt that his 



430 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

own relation to it had, by his conversion, undergone a total 
change ; but then there was the difficulty of theoretically 
defining wherein the change consisted, and of thereby enlight- 
ening the minds of his converts, and protecting them against 
the risk or danger of falling back inadvertently into their old 
relation to it. 

The observation has been made, that it must have been very 
difficult for those whom he addressed clearly to understand the 
difference between the absolute significance of the law, which 
he vehemently denied, and its relative and pedagogic value, 
on which he as vehemently insisted ; to understand how his 
doctrine, which seemed to " make void " the law, in reality 
" established " it. There is neither presumption nor irreverence 
in asserting, that, with all his eloquence and power of dialectic, 
Paul did not succeed in making his meaning clear either to 
himself or to his readers ; or in explaining that change in his 
position, of which yet both he and they were profoundly con- 
scious. We are entitled to say so when we consider how much 
men, who bow to his authority and believe in his inspiration, 
yet differ in their interpretation of his language on this point ; 
and how puzzling his meaning is even when we bring the most 
teachable disposition to the study of his words. The truth is, 
that we may say of Paul, as we may say of Luther, the greatest 
of his disciples, that his own mind was not clear upon the sub- 
ject ; that he did not clearly apprehend the rationale of the 
difference between the legal and evangelical standpoint, of 
which, however, he felt the reality. He betrays the confusion 
of his thought by the very vehemence of his language, by the 
persistency with which he returns again and again to the 
restatement of it, and by the ambiguous sense in which he 
uses the word " law " itself. So far as we can make out, by 
help of the thought which has been expended on the subject 
by the theologians of subsequent ages, what the Apostle would 
be at, was, as already indicated, to deny not merely the validity 
of the ceremonial part of the Mosaic law, or that of the law as 
a whole, moral and ceremonial ; but the obligation of law 
generally, in its propitiatory aspect, or considered as a director}' 
for earning or conciliating the goodwill of God ; all propitia- 
tory service being, by its very nature, grudging, mercenary, and 
servile ; neither worthy of God to accept, nor of man to render, 
being neither spontaneous nor such as should flow from a due 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 43 I 

recognition of the absolute dependence of the finite upon the 
infinite. At the centre of the whole statutory law of Israel 
stood the idea of atonement ; the whole of it, moral and cere- 
monial, was coloured and pervaded by the idea of propitiation. 
And considering that, according to the evangelical view, God 
did not need to be propitiated, the legal service was really a 
misdirection of the spiritual energies ; a struggle against what 
offered no resistance ; a mere beating of the air. And further, 
that service, being ultimately traceable to the principle of fear, 
is not self-regulative in its demonstrations, but a mere calcula- 
tion of less and more, and is under the necessity of following 
some rule or statute laid down by external authority ; whereas 
the principle of love, which flows from the conviction that God 
does not need to be propitiated, but is fatherly and gracious in 
all His purposes with men, is self- regulative, and follows its 
own inward promptings, and acknowledges no outward rule, 
but enters into the enjoyment and exercise of true spiritual 
freedom. And so it comes to be felt, that love to God and 
man is a sufficient rule for all right action, and that external or 
statutory law is only for the lawless and the disobedient. 

It seems to be the case that men in general cannot rise to a 
higher level of religious thought, except by combining the new 
ideas and forms of thought with the old ; and it may be con- 
fidently asserted that the dogma of Paul, respecting the atoning 
sacrifice of Christ, was, as already pointed out, an unconscious 
compromise, or concession to the legal spirit, against which 
the Apostle so earnestly contended. He did not clearly or 
thoroughly grasp the principle that God does not need to be 
propitiated. His own experience, indeed, had convinced him 
that such propitiation could not be offered by man for himself ; 
but the idea was too deeply engrained by his Jewish training 
into his system of thought to suffer him to dismiss it altogether; 
and he was led to take up the middle ground of atonement by 
a third party. As conceived by him, the atonement, besides that 
it did not seem to disparage the fatherly character of God, gave 
a mysterious explanation of the death of Jesus, and lent an 
absolute and permanent significance to his person ; and being 
offered once for all by one in man's stead, it delivered man 
from the necessity of rendering a mercenary service as well as 
from all uncertainty as to his relation to God. This dogma 
has much to recommend it, and has many features in common 



432 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

with the doctrine of Jesus ; but, in so far as any difference is 
apparent, we appeal from Paul the disciple to Jesus the 
Master, whose teaching is the pure echo of our deepest con- 
sciousness. 

St. Paul in his literary character can hardly be acquitted 
from all responsibility for that tendency to Antinomianism 
which has manifested itself from time to time in the history of 
the Christian Church. His language in defence and in illustra- 
tion of his soteriological doctrine comes at some points peril- 
ously near to the Antinomian doctrine : as, e.g., where he says 
(Romans vii. 17-20), " If I do that I would not, it is no more I 
that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me," etc. Such language, 
however it may be explained, certainly produces a startling 
impression at first sight, and it can hardly be denied either that 
there is a colourable pretext for Antinomian teaching in Pauline 
doctrine, or that an apparent connection may be traced 
between the tendency that way and the heterosoteric character 
which St. Paul impressed on the soteriological method of Jesus. 
While the latter taught men by word and deed to redeem them- 
selves, St. Paul represented men as capable of being redeemed, 
and him as invested with redemptive powers and functions. 
While Jesus sought to awaken and call into action those 
capacities by which we may rescue ourselves from the power of 
evil, St. Paul represented him as effecting our rescue by what 
he did and suffered on our behalf. From being an inward pro- 
cess, which takes place in each individual, the soteriological 
process was transmuted into an outward historical event in the 
life of another, who is man's substitute and representative. 
From being carried on in accordance with natural psychological 
laws, it was changed into a process which we may call magical, 
vicarious, and heteronomous. If it cannot be said that the 
work of Christ has, according to St. Paul, quite supplanted the 
inward process and deprived it of all reality, we may affirm at 
least that the central weight of human redemption has been 
removed by him from the sphere of the individual's life to that 
of our common representative. Such is the view naturally im- 
pressed on our minds by the perusal of the Pauline epistles, and 
it has given occasion to endless controversies between those in 
whom the dogmatic interest is paramount and those in whom 
that interest is subordinated to the more general interests of 
religion and morality. If in Paul's dogma the soteriological 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 433 

doctrine is not merged in the soterological, we may say at least 
that he has added a soterological doctrine of his own to the 
soteriology of Jesus. 

There is some appearance as if St. Paul himself had been 
taught by experience and observation that there was something 
not quite satisfactory in his dogmatic system ; that while it 
might exalt the significance of the person of Jesus and keep at 
a distance the propitiatory character of Christian worship, it 
rather weakened the safeguards of the spiritual life of man. 
And hence, while in moments of enthusiasm he styles the 
redemption effected by Christ " complete," his language at other 
times implies that it is not complete except under certain sub- 
jective conditions. We are, according to him, saved by faith in 
Christ's work, and yet commanded to work out our own salva- 
tion. Except for this personal work, the work of Christ our 
substitute is vain, so that, to all intents and purposes, the work 
of Christ requires to be supplemented by that of the individual 
believer himself ; in other words, the method of salvation is 
partly autosoteric and partly heterosoteric. Jesus has achieved 
complete redemption for us, and yet we have to labour and 
struggle with fear and trembling as if all he has done for us 
were nothing, and all yet remained to be done by us. Practic- 
ally this is what it amounts to. Under the Pauline idea of 
redemption there only remains the idea that the autosoteric 
work of the individual, the inward process by which he 
extricates himself from evil, has been made way for by a pre- 
liminary work on the part of Christ. The individual needs to 
enter upon or join in with the work which has already been 
hegun in his behalf. The process in the individual is a con- 
tinuation of the work and life of Christ ; or, according to the 
Paulinistic Epistle to the Colossians, it is " a filling up " of what 
is lacking in the latter. This is a view of the subject which is 
fully satisfied by regarding Jesus as a teacher and an example, 
and so a source of moral and spiritual influence ; but it does 
not require that we should regard him as a redeemer in the 
dogmatic and heterosoteric sense of the word. It seems, 
indeed, as if the central idea of Paul's dogmatic system broke 
down by his own showing and under his own hand, and that 
in the end he returns to the autosoteric doctrine, which the 
synoptists ascribe to Jesus. This apparent inconsistency, or 
retreat from his ordinary position, on the part of the Apostle, 

2 E 



434 THt: NATURAL HISTORY OF 

becomes intelligible when we consider that his dogmatic system 
was the resultant of various heterogeneous elements and forms 
of thought which existed together in his mind. On the one 
hand, there were certain patent and undeniable facts of the 
ethical and religious life, such as those of human frailty and 
individual responsibility : the tradition or reminiscence of the 
life and teaching of Jesus, together with the sudden and mysteri- 
ous revival in the minds of the early disciples of their faith in 
him after his death. On the other hand, there was the idea of 
the bodily apparition of Jesus, to which that revolution was 
ascribed, together with the view, then universally prevalent, of 
the divine government : viz., that it resorted at certain points 
to supernatural agency, whether in the processes of finite minds 
or in those of external nature ; and lastly, there was the 
inherited Jewish idea of the religious relation, into connection 
with which all had to be brought. The dogma resulting from 
these heterogeneous elements could not be wholly satisfactory 
even to Paul himself. By his powerful and ingenious dialectic 
he might slur over its defects and antinomies and conceal them 
from his readers ; but in accomplishing this he could not always 
keep within the margin of his system. In his epistles we mark 
an occasional shifting of ground, a certain jolt in the working 
of the mechanism of his thought which threatens to throw it 
out of gear ; and, to prevent or conceal this catastrophe, a 
recourse here and there to ideas which are at variance with the 
rest of his doctrine. 

According to St. Paul, the faith of the disciple is the instru- 
ment at once of his justification and his sanctification : the sub- 
jective factor, which operates on the mind of God to put His 
mercy and His grace in motion for the disciple's benefit; so 
that, according to this view, the circuit of the soteriological 
process is inundated by a supernatural, mysterious, and in- 
calculable foreign element. When once men have begun to 
draw upon this element in explanation of the facts of the 
spiritual life, there is no limit to which this may be done. The 
process may be carried on till no fact or function of that life is 
left independent of the supernatural element, and the history 
of religion becomes the history of one long, supernatural 
intervention in human affairs. 

A view of the spiritual life is thus arrived at, which, if it 
deepen awe and enrich the' religious sentiment, is yet at 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 435 

variance with that autonomy which is essential to our moral 
nature, and presents to the human intellect a stumbling-block 
which more than outweighs the value of that energy which it 
communicates. At a previous point in our remarks we found 
that it was the faith or expectation of a divine manifestation 
which arrested or stagnated the religious life of the Jew : and 
we now remark that, so far as Christians entertain any expecta- 
tion of this kind, or look for an access of any power, other than 
those w r hich are personal to them, into the springs of their life, 
they just in so far fall back to the Jewish standpoint ; and also 
that the Jewish element, which found expression in St. Paul's 
doctrine of the atonement, protended likewise into his view of 
the nature and operation of divine grace within the soul. 
According to the teaching of Jesus faith operates in a different 
way. It reconciles man to God by the conception of His 
fatherliness, and encourages him to aim at the ideal of his 
nature, in spite of every shortcoming. With every fresh exper- 
ience of the help which he derives from that conception his 
faith mounts to an ever higher level ; he feels more and more 
that he is " master of his fate," and asks for no sign from 
heaven, outward or inward, and for no power beyond or behind 
his own to aid him in his self-discipline. And thus his nature 
is lifted, not by any supernatural agency evoked by his faith, 
but simply by the conviction that, the Supreme Power of the 
universe being on his side, the ideal which beckons him from 
afar is within his reach. The grace of God resides in the 
constitution of the man himself, and in the great system of 
which he forms a part ; while the supernatural aspect in which 
it is presented by St. Paul is only the colour put upon it by 
devout imagination — an indication that the Apostle slid down 
from the elevation on which Jesus stood to that lower level 
which the Church has occupied ever since. 

In order to obtain a distinct, and for us a final view of the 
relation in which Jesus and St. Paul stand to each other, and 
their respective places in the development of religion, we haw- 
to consider the ground which is common to all ethical religions 
as such. These have all had their origin and growth in the 
effort more or less blind, more or less instinctive, to arrive al 
some such view of the invisible forces which rule the world as 
would best encourage and assist the human subject in his 
attempts to approach the ideal, and to soothe the gnawing dis- 



436 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

satisfaction which is occasioned by the sense of shortcoming. 
They are all but experiments to discover the best conditions 
under which the spiritual life can be conducted. In his felt 
inability to rise towards the ideal, to heal the inward schism, or 
to disarm divine anger, man had recourse to acts of technical 
religion, to ritual practices, and especially to sacrifice, as a 
means to these ends. 

Now what distinguishes the religion of Jesus, as it appears 
in his doctrine, is its entire freedom not only, as we have seen, 
from all speculative and metaphysical notions as to the nature 
of God or man, but also from all such makeshifts and sub- 
stitutes as those just mentioned for the truly ideal life. He drew 
his conception of God entirely from the consciousness of his 
own moral and spiritual necessities and aspirations. The idea of 
the Heavenly Father, who forgives the sins of His penitent 
children, was a postulate of his own spiritual nature, and was 
all that was needed to stimulate and prosper his endeavours 
after the perfect life ; it was, as formerly pointed out, his 
theistic interpretation of the blessedness which accompanied 
such endeavours. But this simplicity of his doctrine, which was 
at once its crowning excellence and the seal of its truth, was 
in a great measure lost sight of by St. Paul. This Apostle's 
view of the life and death of Jesus, and of their relation to that 
higher life, which, in some mysterious way, they seemed to have 
the power of awakening in the souls of men, was by the Apostle 
determined, in the first degree, by bringing to bear upon them 
certain speculative and unverifiable ideas inherited from his 
Jewish training ; and in the second and lower degree, by certain 
elements of Greek and Hellenistic thought, which recom- 
mended themselves to his mind as cognate and helpful to the 
former. The recourse which he had to such materials was 
enough to obscure, as by the interposition of a clouded medium, 
the fair form of the religion of Jesus ; but happily not enough 
to prevent it from shining through and revealing its features 
till the present day, as " in a glass darkly," and thus preserving 
its spirit as a living presence among men. If it be thought 
that the criticism which has been applied in the foregoing 
remarks to the doctrine of St. Paul is out of place in a dis- 
cussion as to the origin of Christianity, let it be considered 
that criticism has not been our primary and immediate object, 
but has only been used to show that, on the one hand, his 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 437 

doctrine left an opening for dangerous misconstruction ; and, on 
the other, necessitated a correction or further development, 
which, as will yet be seen, it received in the deutero-Pauline 
period. 

The relation of the dogma of St. Paul to the teaching of 
Jesus, both of which we have now, so far as it was necessary 
for our purpose, passed in review, is of deep interest and 
deserving of our closest attention. That the difference between 
them is not one of mere form is very apparent. Over against 
the simplicity and directness with which Jesus defines the 
method and the process of the new life, there is the complex 
instrumentalism which the Apostle brings into play. Evidently, 
the dogma embraces elements which do not enter into the 
doctrine, and yet there is a certain congruity between them ; 
and they seem superficially to be parts or members of one 
scheme of thought, in such a way, that the parts of the one 
supplement or fit into those of the other. We have en- 
deavoured to account for this by pointing out that the con- 
crete form in which the doctrine of Jesus presented itself to his 
personal followers in his person, death, and resurrection, served 
as a middle term, so to speak, or meeting point, in which the 
doctrine and the dogma converged and passed into each other ; 
and, also, that faith in his resurrection imparted a supernatural 
character to everything connected with him, besides suggesting 
the idea that a mystical action proceeding from his person had 
produced that great change in their feelings and sentiments of 
which his disciples were conscious. We say, therefore, that 
the dogma was neither more nor less than the unfolding or 
explication by the early Church of the concrete form, and of 
that mystical action, in the light of the supernatural hypothesis 
common to the age, and of the inherited categories of Jewish 
and Gentile thought. Or, confining our attention to the part 
played by St. Paul in the dogmatic process, we may obtain a 
slightly different view of what took place. The Apostle never, 
we believe, saw Jesus in the flesh, and was, therefore, never 
acted upon by personal intercourse with him. But, when the 
evangelic view of the religious relation, as taught by Jesus, 
broke upon his mind, and brought about his conversion, we 
may conceive of him as not being satisfied, as Jesus himself had 
evidently been, to rest in that relation as an ultimate fact of 
the religious consciousness, beyond which, and beneath which it 



438 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

was impossible to penetrate : but as seeking to rationalize his 
experience, and imagining that he had found an explanation of 
it, by applying to the death of Jesus the ideas of expiation and 
propitiation which had been the first and earliest thought of 
the ancient world on the subject, and had descended, through 
untold generations, to the Apostle's time. From this point of 
view, it may even be said, that St. Paul was the first rationalist, 
as well as the first dogmatist, of the Christian Church ; or, that 
by one act of rationalism he laid the foundation of the 
dogma. This act of the Apostle was, in truth, rationalistic in 
a sense in which the so-called rationalism of modern times is 
not. The Apostle introduced the supernatural to explain 
experiences and facts which, however wonderful, were really 
natural ; while modern rationalists have only endeavoured, 
oftentimes no doubt by absurd critical methods and expedients. 
to remove the supernatural element thus causelessly introduced, 
But, in the present connection, the important thing is to re- 
member that, in whichever of these two ways the passage from 
the doctrine to the dogma was effected, the communication 
between them has always remained open, and has been traversed 
continually by multitudes ever since. In all ages of the Church 
there have been devout and earnest men, who, though trained 
to the belief in dogma, have yet returned in practice to the 
simple doctrine of Jesus. The possibility of this is to be ex- 
plained by the existence in the human soul of the craving for 
the ideal life. Wherever this craving is sincere and strong it 
prompts and enables the man to effect this passage. It in- 
spires him with the feeling to which the friends of Daniel (iii. 1 8) 
gave expression. He looks for help from God ; but, if that 
help seems to be withheld, he resolves none the less to do the 
will of God. And this resolution becomes the habitual posture 
of his mind. The Christian neophyte, attracted by the 
Christian ideal, but, by experience, becoming alive to the 
apparently insurmountable difficulty of being faithful to it, 
naturally seeks at first to overcome the difficult)' by obtaining, 
through the prayer of faith, that aid from above, the expecta- 
tion of which the dogma seems to warrant ; in fact, he regards 
the dogma as defining the method and the conditions under 
which the fund or treasury of divine aid or grace is ad- 
ministered. But when the expected aid fails to come ; when, 
except at moments of enthusiasm, he seems to himself to be 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 439 

thrown upon his own resources, he next takes encouragement 
from the evangelical idea of the paternal character of God, to 
put his shoulder to the wheel, and to labour with patient 
perseverance in his Christian vocation. Nay, even then, when 
the power for a better life does seem to come, he still imputes 
it to the aid of heaven, regarding that aid as the source of the 
new strength, which seems to be imparted to his will. In 
other words, the dogma abandoned in practice retains its hold 
of the imagination, through which creative faculty the belief in 
external divine aid goes far to supply the lack of that aid, and 
has much the same effect as if that aid were given. 

The prayerful struggle with God to incline Him to send 
down help turns to a struggle of the man with his own spirit 
to comply with the requirements of the gospel. The earnest- 
ness which exhausted itself in supplication for help from above 
converts itself into the earnestness of self-help ; the scope, which 
it finds at first in the form of petition, trains it to seek scope 
for itself in the form of personal action and engagement in the 
Christian struggle. And what is this but to say, that the dogma 
has a pedagogic use : that it serves for a time as a working 
theory of the Christian life, but is not its absolute rule or per- 
fect method. Not that St. Paul framed his dogma by a far- 
seeing or deeply calculated policy to adapt Christianity to 
beginners, but that the dogmatic categories of atonement and 
propitiation satisfied his own craving for an explanation of the 
evangelic idea, while the doctrine that an infinite sacrifice for sin 
had been offered on the Cross satisfied the like craving on the 
part of his converts, by making the divine placability more 
vivid, more easy of apprehension, and perhaps more affecting. 
And it is possible, that owing to its value and place in religious 
education, the dogma, which is by nature plastic, may, in one 
or other of its many forms, endure indefinitely, as an intro- 
duction to the higher thought and practice of Christian ity ; 
that, as according to St. Paul, the law was a schoolmaster 
under the Old Testament to bring men to Christ, so, under the 
New Testament, the dogma may remain in a period of long 
transition, as a propaedeutic more or less indispensable to the 
truly ideal life— the struggle towards perfection. But when 
our object is, as here, to discover the kernel or central truth of 
Christianity, and to satisfy ourselves of its truth, we must look 
at it apart from the dogma. The views here expressed, which 



440 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

come near to saying that there is an esoteric as well as an 
exoteric doctrine of Christianity, may seem to be at variance 
with its spirit ; but it should be borne in mind that all the 
higher forms of religion incline to have these two distinct forms, 
and if we have to admit the same of Christianity, it cannot be 
helped, and all we can say is that the distinction, so far as 
Christianity is concerned, may be considered as one of those 
things that vanish away, being adapted to the immaturity of 
the individual and of the race. 



CHAPTER XVII. 



CONFLICT BETWEEN JEWISH AND GENTILE CHRISTIANITY. 

This discussion might here be brought to a close. Having 
shown that the autosoteric doctrine of Jesus was converted in 
the mind of St. Paul into the heterosoteric dogma, we might 
take for granted that this great transformation was decisive of 
all that followed. For good or for evil, the Pauline dogma 
was now doomed to run its course ; or may we not rather say, 
for good and evil, the remark being obvious that good and evil 
were both combined in it. It was inevitable that the system 
which St. Paul had outlined should be filled up ; that the 
ferment produced by the idea should work itself out amid the 
strife of parties, and in collision with extraneous and alien 
elements of thought. It is therefore of less importance to show 
how this took place. But we must not shrink from proceeding 
till we arrive at the close of what may be called the creative 
(or, let us say, the canonical) period of the dogmatic develop- 
ment. With this in view, we proceed to observe that the 
Pauline dogma did not, without a struggle, establish itself in 
the faith of the rapidly growing Christian community — a 
struggle which, though it came near to rending the Church in 
twain, was yet, in the interests of unity, so tenderly handled in 
the canonical epistles, or alluded to in terms so vague as to have 
required the highest efforts of historical criticism to bring it 
fully to light. To the early origin of this struggle, which 
continued to agitate the Church far into the century and beyond 
it, the epistles of St. Paul bear testimony. The question at 
issue was whether or not Christianity could effect a separation 
between itself and Judaism, and achieve an independent position 
as a distinct and universalistic form of religion ; as a dispensa- 



44 2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

tion of the spirit, and not of the letter. To effect this was an 
indispensable step towards the growth of a catholic Church ; an 
object which, without anachronism, we may say that St. Paul 
had very much at heart almost from the first. For when he 
went up the second time to Jerusalem (Gal. ii. i) to com- 
municate the gospel, which he preached to them which were of 
reputation in the Church there, his aim was to provide, " lest by 
any means he should run, or had run, in vain " — i.e., as 
Weizsacker clearly points out, not that any doubts in his own 
mind as to the truth of his teaching might be dispelled by 
conference with men, who, he was conscious, could " add 
nothing " to him ; but that he might ascertain whether his 
apostolic teaching would meet with recognition on the part of 
the apostles of the circumcision, and so pave the way for the 
association, in one communion, of all believers, whether Jews or 
Gentiles. In becoming followers of Jesus the first disciples did 
not feel that they had ceased to be Jews. The only difference 
between them and the rest of their countrymen consisted in 
their belief that the promised Messiah had now come in the 
person of their Master, and by his death on the Cross had made 
atonement for the sins of the people. They did not, in conse- 
quence of this belief, renounce their allegiance to the law, or 
call in question a single word of ancient prophecy. As a fact, 
they continued as heretofore to observe the legal ordinances 
and to frequent the temple services. They were indeed exceed- 
ingly "zealous of the law," and seem to have enjoyed a reputation 
for uncommon piety. But when St. Paul went a step further, 
and, as we have already seen, defined the nature of the atone- 
ment to be such as to abrogate the law, and to render 
circumcision superfluous, he drew upon himself the charge of 
the rankest heresy and impiety. His antagonism to the law 
scandalized the Jewish Christians, no less than the unconverted 
portion of the people ; and there is much reason to think that 
those persecutors of him and his doctrine, of whom we read so 
much in the Acts of the Apostles, were many of them pro- 
fessors of the new doctrine ; men who felt themselves deeply 
compromised in the eyes of their countrymen by the extreme 
doctrine and practice of one of their number. These men 
sought to vindicate themselves by disowning St. Paul, denouncing 
his doctrine, and declining to have fellowship with his converts. 
Hence a spirit of discord and dissension within the Church, 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 443 

which threatened it with disaster. And had not St. Paul 
braved this danger, and thrown wide the portals of the Church 
for the admission of the Gentiles, it is not impossible that, in 
course of time, the greater mass of the Jewish people would 
have drawn the small community of Christians back into 
renewed unity with itself, and built the sepulchre of Jesus, as 
they had done for the ancient prophets, whom they had slain : and 
have waited patiently for the second advent as they had waited 
for the first. But this was not to be. The great spirit which 
moves through history had decreed that the idea of divine 
catholicity should be established once for all by the " casting 
out " from the Church of the Jewish or exclusive element. 

Let it be here remarked that the turn of events in the early 
Church to which we are referring, viz., the admission of the 
Gentiles and the casting out of the Jews, was not so mysterious 
or inexplicable as it seems to have appeared to St. Paul. 
Placed at a distance from the events in question, and in the 
light of dispassionate criticism, the modern may discern the 
juncture and the sequence of those events better even than one 
who could say " quorum parsfui." History has preserved cases 
on record in w r hich religions have received a kindlier and fuller 
welcome in other lands than in that of their birth. And there 
are a priori considerations which would lead us to expect that, 
whatever might happen with individuals, the spirit of Christianity 
would be more purely and simply caught up by Gentile popula- 
tions than by the Jewish people. Gentile habits of thought and 
conduct were so widely different from those of Christianity that 
when a Gentile did embrace Christianity he could hardly but 
feel that he had taken a great step, involving a complete break 
with his past life, and putting him on his guard against a 
revival of its influence. On the other hand, the kinship and 
historical connection between Jewish and Christian modes of 
thought were such that, as already said, in becoming a 
Christian the Jew might feel that the step was not a great one, 
and that he might, after a sort, still remain a Jew. There was 
thus a temptation for the Jewish-Christian to retain as much of 
his old faith and practice as he could possibly combine with his 
Christianity; so to alloy the pure gold of the gospel, and even 
to slip back into his old way of thinking and acting, and once 
more to become a full-blooded Jew. This tendency goes far to 
account for the gradual disappearance of the Jewish section o\' 



444 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the Church. The probability is that that section did not so 
much merge itself into the Gentile or Catholic Church as rather 
relapse into Judaism. At all events, it lost its vitality as a 
distinct section, and disappeared by degrees from record. But 
the episode in the history of the Church, viz., the conflict 
between the two sections which has led to these remarks, was 
so decisive in its consequences, and so instructive in itself, 
besides affording confirmation of our general views as to St. 
Paul's dogmatic definitions, that we shall now enter into details 
to show how the conflict arose and was ended. 

The Christian community was recruited from the beginning 
by converts, partly from the Jewish and partly from the Gentile 
populations. And the beliefs held by these two sections of the 
Church were, or seemed to be, superficially very much the same. 
But we shall see immediately that, at certain central points, 
the agreement between them was not real, but superficial and 
verbal only : a circumstance which necessarily led to misunder- 
standings in conference, and to divergences in actual practice, 
which rendered abortive all approaches to union between the 
two branches of the Church. There are various indications 
that St. Paul was forestalled in his view of the atoning nature 
of the death of Jesus by the earlier disciples. There is, indeed, 
the authority of the Apostle himself for thinking that it was so. 
His language in Gal. ii. shows that, amid differences between 
him and them, a belief in the atonement was common ground ; 
and from I Cor. xv. 3 it may be inferred that the older 
disciples had derived this view of the crucifixion from the Old 
Testament scriptures, while he himself had received it second- 
hand from them, or by what he considered to be direct 
illumination from above. And though in Luke xxiv. 26, 
Acts ii. 38, and other passages belonging to the earliest period, 
or at least indicative of the belief of the Church from the 
beginning of the gospel, atonement is not distinctly expressed, 
yet the thought of it is not far off, and was sure to suggest 
itself ; so that remission of sins " in the name of Jesus " might 
easily become remission by virtue of the death of Jesus. 
Further, the Jewish section of the primitive Church seems 
to have concurred with the Gentile section in regarding Jesus 
as a Son of God no less than as a Son of David. At least, 
there is nothing in St. Paul's polemic against his Jewish 
opponents to lead to an opposite conclusion ; and if the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 445 

Apokalypse represents an early and prevalent phase of Jewish 
Christian thought, the somewhat dubious and halting Christo- 
logy rises at times to a level with that of St. Paul, and even to 
that of the fourth Evangelist But this is a view of the Apoka- 
lypse which has been very much shaken by recent criticism, so 
that we cannot build any conclusion upon it. We know, 
however, that in the rabbinical literature of the 2nd century, 
Jewish Christians are reproached as apostates, because they 
had departed from the monotheistic principle of Judaism, so 
far as to regard Jesus as a divine being. Yet it is probable 
that the tendency on the part of the Jewish converts (involun- 
tary, nay, inevitable, and even commendable, as it no doubt 
was), to retain their former habits of thought in connection 
with their new faith, may have interfered, in the minds of 
many of them, with that conception of Christ which was 
essential to Pauline Christianity, and may have inclined them 
towards those Ebionitic views of Christ's person into which many 
of them seem ultimately to have fallen. It may be that, from 
the very first, their Christological view was not sufficiently clear 
and explicit to conquer their Jewish habits of thought and to 
place them securely on the Paulo-Christian level. But, on the 
whole, we seem to be justified in concluding that no material 
difference of opinion as to the work and person of Christ existed 
visibly between the two sections of converts, or that the differ- 
ences which did exist were overlaid or kept out of sight by the 
use of terms which were common to both. Yet a difference 
between the Pauline and Jewish-Christian conception of Christ, 
all but fundamental and insurmountable, which otherwise might 
not for long have betrayed its presence, soon came to light in 
the practical conduct of life, or in the soteriological department 
of the dogma. 

It was inevitable that the first disciples, the moment they 
took up the idea that the death of Jesus was an atonement for 
sin, should ask themselves the question, How far did the 
efficacy of the atonement extend, and what were the condi- 
tions for participating in its efficacy ? Their answers to these 
questions could not be doubtful. They had, as we have shown, 
arrived previously at a belief in the Messianic office of Jesus, 
and their view of his death as an atonement presupposed that 
belief. Their idea of the atonement was therefore necessarily 
controlled by that of his Messiahship, and the fact that the 



446 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Messiah had come of Israel, and belonged to Israel, was calcu- 
lated to intensify their conceit of national privilege, and to 
deepen the prejudice of exclusiveness in their minds. It can 
easily be understood how, as it is said in Acts xxi. 20, the Jews 
who believed in Jesus, and thus added a new article to their 
creed, should, on that very account, be the more " zealous of 
the law." The verse seems to imply that this was a common, 
if not universal, characteristic of Jewish believers. They were 
prone to persuade themselves that their new faith demanded of 
them a strict observance of the old law, and that the atonement 
was limited to the Jewish people, and to individuals of other 
nationalities who conformed to its requirements. They not 
only continued to observe the rites and ceremonies to which 
they had been accustomed, but they maintained that the 
Gentiles could enter their communion and share in their privi- 
leges only by undergoing circumcision, as the sign of the 
covenant, and so taking upon them the yoke of the law. The 
born Jew could not easily be persuaded to admit those who 
refused to pass under that yoke to the same platform with 
himself. He could not be made to understand how a system of 
divine appointment could be of transient obligation. He had 
always believed that the punctilious and universal observance 
of the law was the very goal of the national history, and that, 
apart from circumcision, the practice of all the virtues was of 
no avail in God's sight. He regarded the antinomism which 
St. Paul preached as a species of libertinism, against which 
his religious feelings and his moral sense rose in rebellion. 
He knew of no other law than the written or oral law of Israel, 
and had been scrupulously trained to look to that for the 
guidance of his conduct, and to regard the Gentiles, who were 
without that law, as having no proper directory of moral 
conduct, and therefore unfitted to enter the kingdom of God. 

Owing to their previous habits of thought, the Jewish 
Christians could hardly be expected to apprehend the simple 
doctrine of Jesus. Their doctrinal position was one of transi- 
tion between the old and the new. Recent researches into the 
theology of the synagogue, by Weber especially, have brought 
out the fact, to which Old Testament theology also bears 
witness, that the ideas current in Judea respecting atonement 
were vague and complex in the highest degree. The offering 
of sacrifice, though the most striking, was by no means the 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 447 

only method of atonement. According to the nature of the 
offence, it required to be conjoined with penitence on the part 
of the offender, and with numberless performances of a ritual- 
istic kind prescribed by usage and statute. And above all, the 
notion prevailed, that when, as might often be felt to be the 
case, the personal performances of the sinner did not suffice to 
atone for his past sins, the supererogatory merits of righteous 
men might be imputed to him, or thrown by the Supreme Judge 
into the scale in his favour. The religious life of the Jewish 
people was powerfully swayed by these ideas, and when con- 
verted to the faith of Jesus as Messiah, it was inevitable that 
they should regard the great atonement simply as the highest 
instance of vicarious suffering : or as a means of expiating sin 
supplementary to all the other means appointed or sanctioned 
by the divine law and by prophetic authority, so that these 
latter still remained in force and their observance still obliga- 
tory. The sufferings of Jesus were placed by them on a footing 
with the sufferings of other pious men — expiatory, like theirs, 
of sins, though of higher value. His sufferings had added to 
the fund of merit accumulated by the prophets and righteous 
men of former ages for the benefit of the Jewish people, and 
formed a new " advantage " (Rom. iii. 1 ) to all of Jewish faith 
and Jewish extraction. 

The new consciousness of the primitive disciples was of the 
nature of an instinct, or of a sympathetic attachment to Jesus. 
The new principle which had come into their lives existed in the 
form of an unthinking, absorbing devotion to his all-subduing 
personality ; and manifested itself chiefly in their endeavour to 
mould their lives upon his: a devotion of which, simple-minded, 
earnest men, without abstract theories or preconceptions, are 
quite susceptible. They did not so much receive his doctrine 
as believe in his person ; and had the cause of Christianity 
rested solely on men whose chief or sole qualification was 
devotion of such sort, it might never have come to more than a 
form of Judaism, and we should now have had a Jewish sect 
instead of the Christian Church. The novelty of Christianity, 
as such men conceived of it, would not have been distinctive or 
specific enough in principle to effect its disjunction from 
Judaism, and to give to it a secure and independent position. 
They and their converts would have continued in theory and 
practice to combine the new faith with the conceit of Jewish 



448 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

privilege and the obligation of Jewish rites and usages, and 
the gospel would never have been preached in its freedom to 
the Gentiles. 

Had Paul reached his faith in the great atonement by the 
same avenue as the early disciples, he would probably have 
limited its virtue (by which is meant its area of incidence, and 
its degree of efficacy) just as they did. But though, from the 
moment of his conversion, he, no doubt, regarded Jesus as the 
Messiah, yet it was through a distinct channel, viz., that of his 
own prior experience, touched and illuminated by what of the 
teaching of Jesus had reached his ear, or had been conveyed 
" without the word " to his heart and understanding. He was 
thus led to apprehend the death of Jesus as an atonement, with- 
out viewing it, as those others did, through the veil of Jewish 
prejudice. There is nothing a priori improbable in this re- 
markable circumstance. Jesus was under the necessity of 
recruiting his company of followers from the population of 
Galilee. These recruits were, it may well be supposed, more or 
less well-meaning men ; but they were probably also slow of 
understanding and dull of apprehension ; and it is conceivable 
that, while they missed the supreme significance of his doctrine, 
notwithstanding their intimate intercourse with him, a few 
straggling hints of it might be sufficient to stimulate and 
illumine the mind of a man prepared, like St. Paul, for its 
reception, by keenness of intellect and previous experience. 

From that source a new element of thought which! had 
escaped the observation of the primitive disciples, and of which 
they knew nothing, had entered the mind of Paul. It was the 
simple and far-reaching idea which had distilled itself from all 
he had heard of the life and doctrine of Jesus, viz., that God 
was by nature propitious and did not need to be propitiated ; 
which had delivered him instantaneously, and as by volcanic 
energy, from the fruitless and maddening attempt to propitiate 
God, and broke through the limitations and prejudices which 
circumscribed the thoughts of the earlier disciples. This idea 
was what emancipated him from the sense of legal bondage, 
and revealed to him the principle of evangelical freedom, 
besides discovering to him the foundation on which an all- 
embracing religion might be reared. And this same idea con- 
tinued powerfully to influence his thought. The immediacy 
with which it appealed to his reason gave to it an absolute sig- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 449 

nificance, and set authority and tradition aside as by some 
higher right, like that which Jesus himself claimed when he set 
aside the law of the Sabbath. Jesus claimed that right as the 
Son of Man, i.e., in virtue of that true humanity which spoke 
out in him (Mark ii. 28). And St. Paul felt in like manner 
that it was the true humanity in himself which answered to 
the appeal made to it by that evangelic view of the divine 
character which flashed upon him in his moment of anguish 
and despair. 

It may indeed be questioned, in the name of the thought 
and accumulated experience of the present time, whether even 
he penetrated to the full consequence and understood the full 
range of the new doctrine. For a moment, never forgotten by 
him, he rose to the vision or contemplation of the new concep- 
tion of God, and stood upon the height which Jesus securely 
and permanently occupied. But the dogma which he pro- 
ceeded to construct is a proof that it was only for a moment. 
If the view taken in these pages of the origin of his dogma be 
generally or substantially correct, even Paul himself departed or 
fell away from the pure and simple doctrine of Jesus, or from 
that idea of the religious relation which had been the cause of 
his conversion. We can easily understand how the idea of 
atonement might be too strongly entrenched in the Apostle's 
mind to be dispossessed even by his deeper insight. It was 
the means which, from the earliest time and for untold ages, 
the ancient world — Jewish and Gentile — had made use of to 
propitiate God, and to restore the sinner to a sense of His 
favour. The worshipper of old had a dim conception that the 
act of sacrifice was a solemn acknowledgment that nothing less 
than the dedication of himself, soul and body, was the debt 
which he owed to his Maker, and he had hoped that that 
acknowledgment would be mercifully accepted as a partial, in 
place of a perfect, discharge of his debt. In such a practice 
lay a germ or dim presentiment of the purest form of religion, 
but which, just because it was only a germ, had to be done 
away when that which was perfect was come. But the 
idea had too powerful a hold upon the Apostle's mind for him 
to get rid of it entirely. He felt that it must still have a place 
and a function in the new religious relation which had disclosed 
itself to his mind, and he proceeded to incorporate it in his 
view of that relation. The historical fact, for fact it is, that 

2 F 



450 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

disciples of such undoubted devotion and common intelligence 
as Peter, James, and John, and their followers, committed the 
mistake of thinking the observance of the Jewish law as in 
some way conducive to salvation, and did not perceive the 
incongruity of such an idea with the doctrine of their Master, 
contributes a presumption that another disciple of equal 
devotion and of greater depth of spiritual insight might fall 
into the lesser misapprehension of transferring the atoning 
function to that Master, biased as that other was by the desire 
to magnify the work and nature of him who had stooped from 
heaven to pluck him as a brand from the burning. 

The persistent and latent power over the Apostle's mind of 
the evangelical idea to which his conversion was due, showed 
itself in this, that the atonement with which he overlaid it was 
made by him to answer to that idea so far as range and scope 
were concerned. He represented the atonement as of such 
absolute value that, instead of supplementing, it superseded all 
other forms of atonement and rendered them superfluous. He 
made it to be the one only and sole expiation for human sin. 
The legal conception of the religious relation was thus set 
aside ; law itself was made of no effect ; all men were placed 
on a footing of equality in the sight of God ; privilege was 
abolished ; and the distinction between Jew and Gentile, 
between clean and unclean, was effaced. The Apostle saw no 
inconsistency between the propitious character of God and an 
atonement which was made, not by man himself, but by God, 
in the person of man's representative. It seemed to him 
that one fate had overtaken all legal services, whether of 
expiation or of thanksgiving. The propitiatory element which 
was present in both alike was condemned. The service of the 
Christian was to be a service of pure thanksgiving, from which 
the propitiatory element was discharged ; a service of undis- 
sembled love and thankfulness for the atonement, which was 
God's supreme and unspeakable gift to man. 

We see that both St. Paul and the earlier disciples were 
agreed in attaching the character of an atonement to the death 
of Jesus. But there was this difference between his view of it 
and theirs, that he laid greater emphasis upon it than they did, 
or than the Jewish Christians generally were disposed to do. 
While these latter maintained their faith in the Messiahship of 
Jesus, in spite of his ignominious death, he became the Messiah 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 45 I 

for Paul in consequence of it. While they spoke of his cruci- 
fixion apologetically as at most a culmination of sacrificial 
worship, which sanctioned or even glorified the sacrifices and 
other ceremonial observances of the law, he went the length of 
regarding it aggressively, as superseding and abrogating all other 
sacrifice, together with the whole system of ceremonial service, 
and especially as doing away at once and for ever with the 
propitiatory element of man's own conformity to the divine will. 
The distinction thus pointed out between the view of St. Paul 
and that of the earlier disciples gives meaning to those passages 
in which St. Paul speaks of his gospel as something apart and 
distinct (Rom. ii. 16 ; 2 Cor. iv. 3, xi. 4 ; Gal. ii. 2 ; 2 Thess. 
ii. 1 4). There is indeed every reason to believe that there was 
more than a merely nominal distinction between the gospel, 
which was powerful for the conversion of the Gentiles, and the 
gospel which retained the allegiance of the Jewish Christians ; 
between the gospel of the uncircumcision and the gospel of the 
circumcision. It was by the preaching of the former that 
Christianity advanced to its universalistic position in the world. 
The Jewish leaven might continue to work in secret ; but 
Christianity became a great power of God in the world by the 
labour of men who did their best to expel that leaven from the 
Church. 

The new conception of God and of the religious relation, 
which, as we have contended, was the real cause of St. Paul's 
conversion, opened his eyes to many things ; and among others 
to this, that the Gentiles who had not the law were " a law to 
themselves," and that to have the spirit of love awakened in 
them, was all that was needed to give them a clear discernment 
of the indelible characters of the law written on their hearts, 
as well as an impulse to an ever growing conformity with it. 
And this one thing needful for their moral life, he found in 
"the word of the Cross," or in the doctrine of atonement, offered 
for human sin by the self-sacrifice of the Son of God. The love 
awakened by the contemplation of that great manifestation of 
divine love, seemed to him to supply a new rule and a new 
motive for human conduct, fitted both to enable the Gentile 
Christians to dispense with all other law, and also to eman- 
cipate Jewish Christians from the burdensome observance of 
their own statutory requirements. When St. Paul found that 
statutory observances were no longer necessary to his own 



452 THE NATURAL HISTORY Ol 

spiritual life, or to the maintenance of his communion with God 
he boldly set them aside, and taught others to do likewise. 
He had the conviction that the truth which had set himself 
free, was by its very nature a charter of freedom for all men 
without distinction. For no man, it has been said, " was ever 
yet convinced of any momentous truth, without feeling in him- 
self the power, as well as the desire, of communicating it." 

From that new rule and that new motive there evolved 
itself, in the mind of the Apostle, the idea of human, or rather 
Christian liberty : an idea w r hich, so far as we can gather 
from the synoptic reports, had not been clearly or explicitly 
expressed by Jesus in his teaching. At the most, he only 
taught it indirectly, by the more or less frequent exercise of it 
in his own person, as, e.g., by claiming for himself and for men 
generally, the lordship over the Sabbath day : by setting aside 
the Levitical regulations as to divorce, and by his apparent non- 
observance of Jewish ritual generally. This absence of any 
express reference to religious liberty, either was, or seemed to 
be, an omission in his doctrine, which the fourth Evangelist, with 
St. Paul in his view, could not fail to supply in his hyper-ideal 
report of the teaching of Jesus : " If the Son shall make you 
free, ye shall be free indeed." " The truth shall make you free" 
(John viii. 32-36). But it was St. Paul, who, having felt himself 
enfranchised from his bondage to the statutory law, and 
released from the necessity of any propitiatory service whatever, 
was the first to utter the idea. His sense of enfranchisement 
he explained to himself, by regarding the atonement on the 
Cross as complete in itself, and as superseding all other pro- 
pitiations, as well as the law r which enjoined them. i\nd it 
was what he had in view, when he declared that he was called 
in the moment of his conversion to the apostleship of the 
Gentiles, who had not the law. His clear and vivid perception 
of the principle which differentiated the doctrine of Jesus from 
that current among the Jews of his day, gave him courage to 
proclaim with unhesitating confidence that legal and traditional 
observances interfered with Christian liberty and were no 
longer binding ; and that the death of Christ was the medium 
of a universal benefit, comprehensive of Jew and Gentile alike. 
He was thus qualified from the moment of his conversion to be 
the Apostle of the Gentiles ; and in that qualification he recog- 
nized a special call. Renan, indeed, gives it as his opinion, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 45 3 

that St. Paul, no less than the other apostles, preached the 
necessity of circumcision in the first period of his ministry; but 
that he felt himself compelled, with a view to the success of his 
work among the Gentiles, to admit many of- them, " surrep- 
titiously," into the Church without insisting upon their submission 
to that rite; and that by degrees he came to consider it, and 
ritual generally, as useless, and even as derogatory to the merits 
of Christ. Looked at from the standpoint of ordinary historical 
pragmatism, this view has much to recommend it. But cer- 
tainly it is not the view which the writer of the Acts of the 
Apostles took ; and what is more decisive, it is not the view 
which may be gathered from St. Paul's own account in the 
Epistle to the Galatians i. 12-16. And though the singularity 
of the Apostle's conversion is much enhanced, when it is 
regarded as the sudden revelation to his mind of his distinctive, 
and universalistic gospel, yet we are disposed to adopt this view 
of it, in preference to that, which is otherwise the more likely, 
both because it has the authority of Paul himself, and because 
it harmonizes best with the view we have taken of his con- 
version. The same critic is also of opinion, as might be 
expected, that it is historically inaccurate to say, that St. Paul 
advanced a claim to apostleship from the time of his con- 
version ; for that the conviction of his apostleship took 
possession of his mind slowly, and only became fixed after the 
great success of his first missionary journey. In view of St. 
Paul's own expressions, this opinion also is very doubtful : and 
it may be dismissed as of little material consequence, though, 
like the other opinion just referred to, it somewhat reduces the 
marvellous nature of the disclosure made to the mind of the 
Apostle. 

With the existence in the Church of fundamentally 
different views as to the nature and extent of the 
atonement, it was inevitable that misunderstandings should 
arise between its different sections. We have shown that 
the national feeling of exclusiveness was apt to be intensi- 
fied in its Jewish section. There are various indications 
in the New Testament, and especially in the Acts of the 
Apostles, that there was a minority in this section, which, with 
deeper insight into the principles of the gospel, yet out of a 
natural feeling of piety, retained their inherited usages without 
seeking to impose them on the Gentile converts. But this 



454 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

considerate and moderate position was soon found to be 
untenable, because it did not supply a modus vivendi when the 
Jewish and Gentile communities came together. xA.nd, more- 
over, the rigid and conservative party in the Jewish section 
became more and more intolerant of the greater freedom 
enjoyed by the Gentile converts, and sought to impose legal 
observances upon them. By insisting upon their own historical 
right and their national privileges, they succeeded in over-ruling 
the more liberal, or mediating and temporizing party, among 
their Jewish brethren, as we may see in the case of Peter 
himself at Antioch. The relations between the two sections of 
the Church became more and more strained, especially after 
the unsuccessful effort made by St.. Paul, as recorded in Gal. ii., 
to prevail upon Peter to live as did the Gentiles, and to assert 
for himself the same liberty as these latter enjoyed. We call 
St. Paul's effort unsuccessful because, though Renan believes 
that he did prevail upon Peter to adopt the more liberal 
practice, Weizsacker shows, by a fine analysis of St. Paul's 
language, that such was not the case. The probability is that 
the zealot party which, at that crisis, prevailed against the 
better judgment of St. Peter, gradually gained the upper hand 
in the Jewish section of the Church, which, for the greater part, 
and in course of time, would relapse into Judaism, and fall 
away from connection with the Christian community. It was 
to counteract the tendency in this direction, and to prevent 
the Gentiles from being overborne and carried away by these 
zealots, as many of them seem to have been (Gal. iii.), that St. 
Paul emphasized his distinctive doctrine and sought to establish 
the free universaKsm of the gospel, by his broad principle of 
justification by faith alone, without the works of the law. It 
was probably with the same end in view that the Apostle, 
while in the interests of practical religion he covertly and 
virtually qualified this principle, yet never seems to have with- 
drawn the formula. To call the latter in question was left for 
another apostle, viz., St. James (ii. 14-26). 

It would seem, indeed, as if the line of thought and action 
adopted by St. Paul in this matter went far to enhance the 
danger of schism and dissension in the Church. The idea of 
Christian liberty, as expounded by him, was at once a weapon 
for conquest and a cause of strife. In his uncompromising 
zeal and his enthusiastic devotion to the pure idea, he not only 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 45 5 

admitted the Gentiles to gospel privileges without requiring 
from them obedience to the law ; but he also insisted that the 
Jewish converts should descend from their assumed position of 
privilege and consent to occupy the same platform as the 
Gentile converts, that so there might be equality between them, 
and that the two sections might form one community of 
Christians, not divided by difference of usage. He goes near 
to imply that to attach value to the Mosaic observances was 
tantamount to a dishonour of the gospel, and to a denial of 
Christ (Gal. v. 1-4) ; that to submit to circumcision and to 
persevere in the practice of legal rites involved a forfeiture of 
the grace of God and the loss of Christian status. 

The positions taken up by Paul on the one side, and by the 
Jewish Christians on the other, were plainly irreconcilable, and 
had they been maintained the unity, and possibly the very 
existence of the Church, would have been imperilled. Had the 
two sections of the Church been suffered to grow up together, 
and to become consolidated each, for itself, they would have 
been parted as by an invisible but impassable wall, like that 
which separates Mahometans and Hindoos in India at the 
present day, and would sooner or later have engaged in an 
internecine conflict. The tolerance with which even Paul 
seems latterly to have regarded the Jewish section on the score 
of its weakness in the faith, was a species of intolerance — and 
was necessarily felt to be so by the Jewish Christians, who 
clung to their ancient forms of worship, and could have no 
other effect than either to compel them to go over to the 
Gentile majority or to widen the breach between it and them. 
The former alternative was that aimed at by St. Paul, who felt, 
with statesmanlike instinct, that it was absolutely necessary 
that the section in which the free principle of Christianity had 
come into play, should, for its own self-preservation, or for the 
preservation of its principle, expel in some way the other 
section from the Christian communion. To have forced this 
alternative upon the Church, even at the risk of widening the 
breach, was the achievement of St. Paul. From St. Peter, who 
was at once the most enlightened and commanding of the 
original disciples, he certainly got no assistance. If St. Peter 
ever rose to the full height of Christian liberty, as perhaps 
might be inferred from what is said of the part he took in the 
conversion and baptism of Cornelius, it was only for a moment, 



456 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and after a period of wavering and indecision he seems to have 
fallen away from it again. Either he never attained to a clear 
intellectual conviction on the subject, or he had not the courage 
of his conviction. And of these alternative explanations of his 
conduct, the latter, it seems to us, would do him an injustice. 
We subscribe to the opinion of Weizsacker, that the apostle's 
vacillation and apparent duplicity at Antioch, with his ultimate 
retreat from the Catholic point of view, which for a time he 
almost seems to have attained, was due not so much to want 
of courage, as to the want of the full insight enjoyed by St. 
Paul into the nature and principle of Christian liberty ; or, as 
we should say, to his want of insight into the evangelical 
principle, the ground of Christian liberty. His deficiency, in 
this respect, made it impossible for him to take up a decided 
and resolute position, and placed him under the sway of the 
narrow zealot faction which insisted on the prescriptive or 
divine right of the Jewish law. In analogous cases it is 
always so. 

St. Paul's consciousness of Christian liberty was founded on 
his immediate insight into the religious relation, and was really 
independent of any reasoning upon the subject. But the grand 
difficulty remained for him to impart the same consciousness to 
the minds of others, but especially his Jewish countrymen, or 
to justify it to himself and to them on rational or quasi- 
rational grounds. This difficulty arose from the fact that the 
liberty claimed by him was liberty from the law, which had 
been given by divine authority, and which rested, therefore, on 
a sanction presumably immutable. The real justification of 
his doctrine lay in that evangelical view of the religious relation 
which had revealed itself to his mind. But even if the Apostle 
was fully conscious of this, he felt that for those who had not 
clearly apprehended that relation he required to find another 
explanation more level to their apprehension. With this in 
view, he called to his aid the allegorical, or, let us say, the 
rabbinical use of the Old Testament, by which, as every one 
knows who is familiar with his epistles, he made out a case to 
show that the law had come between the promise given to the 
fathers and its fulfilment in Christ, and was therefore of 
temporary validity ; that it had been added because of trans- 
gressions, to provoke the lusts and to shut men up to the 
gospel ; and that its function was gone when, as the fourth 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 45 7 

Evangelist expressed it, " Grace and truth had come by Jesus 
Christ." 

This apology for Christian liberty was evidently suggested to 
the Apostle by his own peculiar experience under the law, and 
might appear to himself to be satisfactory and serviceable in his 
controversy with the Jewish Christians ; but it could not but 
appear to be very questionable and unsatisfactory to men who 
had no such experience, and did not understand what he meant 
when he said that the strength of sin is the law. Many of 
those, therefore, who shared with St. Paul in his sense of 
emancipation from legal bondage could not but cast about for 
another solution of the difficulty. Accordingly, we find another 
such in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which may be regarded, and 
was possibly intended, in part at least, as a defence of Christian 
liberty from another point of view than that which was taken 
by St. Paul. This epistle, as its superscription seems to imply, 
is addressed to Jewish Christians ; and the writer, who was 
certainly a Jewish convert, devised his solution by calling to 
his aid the great and catching idea — confessedly of Hellenistic 
derivation — that finite things are images of the divine ; that, 
corresponding to the world of sense, there is the world of spirit, 
of which that other is only a shadow or a prophecy ; the same 
idea as is expressed in Goethe's words, " Alles vergangliche ist 
nur ein Gleichniss." The argument is, that the law belonged to 
the lower, imperfect, or faulty system, and had been ordained 
as a shadow of heavenly things yet to come ; so that its obliga- 
tion and raison d'etre vanished in the presence of those better 
things under the gospel. And there can be no doubt that, 
granting his philosopheme, this method of disposing of the 
Jewish law, and demonstrating the cessation of Jewish privilege, 
is more simple and intelligible than the highly subtle, complex, 
and over-ingenious method of St. Paul. With the reservation 
just made, we may say indeed that it addresses itself to the 
general reason and common mind of man, which delights in 
tracing grand analogies or correspondences between different 
systems, and finds in such correspondences an evidence of a 
divine, all-comprehensive plan. And to Jewish minds especially, 
this view of the law, as containing a mystical, symbolical, and 
prophetic reference in many or all of its arrangements and 
details, to analogous parts of the higher dispensation of the 
gospel, could not but appear to be more respectful or, so to 



458 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

speak, more complimentary to the law, than the view of it taken 
by St. Paul ; and therefore more fitted to reconcile the Jewish 
converts to the thought of its transitory nature. 

The difference between St. Paul's point of view and that of 
Apollos, or whoever was the writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, is conspicuous in their diverse treatment of the atone- 
ment made by Christ on the Cross. By summarily setting law 
aside, as St. Paul does, that Apostle debars himself from any 
but a very general appeal to its sanctions and provisions, though 
atonement was part of its requirements, and had its sanction. 
We find accordingly that he nowhere enters into legal details, 
and that he sees a counterpart of the atonement offered by 
Jesus, not in the animal sacrifices prescribed by the law, but in 
the prophetic or Pharisaic idea, that the sufferings of righteous 
men atone for the sins of the community — the idea which 
receives its classical expression in Isa. liii. On that idea he 
rests, and from it he ascends to the atonement offered on the 
Cross. The writer to the Hebrews, on the contrary, regards 
that atonement as having its divinely ordained type and counter- 
part or pattern in the legal sacrifices. He thus pays a certain 
homage to the Mosaic ritual, which St. Paul goes near to 
ignore or set aside. But while he thus assigns to the law a 
well-defined and honourable office, and seems to be more 
zealous or careful of it than St. Paul is, he at the same time, as 
we have seen, contrives by means of his Hellenistic philo- 
sopheme, to make out its temporary obligation, and to vindicate 
the emancipation of believers from its requirements. To him 
the atoning virtue of the Cross was a postulate of the legal 
rites, which, as belonging to the world of sense, necessarily 
pointed to something higher and beyond themselves ; and that 
could only be the Cross of Christ. In the height of his devo- 
tion a prophetic soul had exclaimed, " I will offer bullocks and 
goats" (Ps. lxvi. 15). But the interpreter of the new era says, 
" It is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats can take 
away sins." The blood of a nobler victim is required for that : 
and what nobler victim could there be than the Son of 
God? 

It must be confessed, however, that the problem which 
Christian liberty presented to the Church was completely 
solved neither by St. Paul nor by the writer to the Hebrews. 
Neither St. Paul's view of the provisional and temporary nature 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 459 

of the law, nor the Hellenistic philosopheme could lay claim to 
a divine sanction. The roundabout dialectic by which St. Paul 
(Gal. iii.) and this other writer (ch. viii.) seek to establish a 
claim to such a sanction for their respective views, is as incon- 
clusive as it can well be, except for those who, being otherwise 
imbued with the idea of Christian liberty, were disposed to be 
satisfied with it. And if we bear in mind that, for the Jews 
generally, the Mosaic ritual was an ordinance of heaven and 
the Old Testament an inspired volume, and that the claim of 
the Mosaic dispensation, to " unchangeableness" and perpetuity, 
was for them neither "economical" nor "simulated," as Newman 
in his work on the Arians declared it to be, but absolute and 
bona fide, we cannot conceal from ourselves that, in the con- 
troversy which St. Paul waged, the logic was all on the side of 
his opponents. The new spirit and the higher truth were 
indeed on the Apostle's side. But, while he affirmed the 
higher truth, he did not trust to its native force alone, as Jesus 
had done, but endeavoured, not very successfully as we have 
seen, by the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, 
common among the Jews of that day, and by an ingenious but 
perplexing dialectic, to carry conviction to the minds of his 
converts. We do not mean to insinuate that this was a 
sophistical artifice on the part of the Apostle, for it reflected his 
own experience and satisfied himself ; nor was it altogether a 
brutum fulmen, for it served, in the immediate emergency, to 
gainsay and nonplus the adversaries by meeting them on their 
own ground, and answering them in a way to which they could 
not consistently object. Yet, though the Apostle's appeal to 
the law itself might gainsay or silence such of the Jewish 
converts as desired to be under the law (Gal. iv. 21), it is very 
doubtful whether it was calculated to tell upon their convictions ; 
while it could not possibly tell upon the mind of the Gentile 
converts generally, to whom the Jewish law was nothing, and 
who took little or no interest in Jewish modes of thought, or in 
questions about the law (Acts xviii. 15, xxiii. 29), but had 
been won over to Christianity by its appeal to their higher 
nature, and by the confident report of the resurrection of its 
Founder. 

The principle of Christian liberty was involved in the evan- 
gelical consciousness of the religious relation, but wherever that 
consciousness was not fully developed the legal yoke, unlifted, 



460 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

still remained to burden and to fetter the soul. And, as is 
invariably the case, where a principle lying in the background 
is not apprehended, mere reasoning and dialectic were unable to 
break that yoke, and so to avert the danger of schism. Under 
the circumstances, we might be sure that that danger would 
arise. And the critical study of the New Testament and other 
primitive documents which shed light, more or less dim, upon the 
early history of the Church, has, we think, demonstrated that 
this danger was much more serious and of longer duration than 
can be gathered from a superficial and uncritical perusal of these 
documents. In the end the danger was, we believe, averted 
partly by the expulsion of the Jewish-Christian element, and 
partly by the growth of conciliatory relations between the 
Jewish-Christian section and the Gentile section of the Church, 
as represented by St. Paul, and by the involuntary resort on 
both sides to compromise. In the New Testament, critics have 
imagined that they find indications of a desire on both sides to 
avert, by mutual concessions, the disruption which seemed to 
impend : concessions made, it may be, with reluctance, and as it 
were, with an arriere pensee, but still made, though in a covert and 
undemonstrative way, with the desired effect of building up a 
communion in which Christians of Jewish and Gentile extraction 
were welded into unity, and which in due time became recog- 
nized as the orthodox and catholic Church, from which no 
section or individual could dissent or stand aloof without 
incurring the charge of heresy. 

Let it here be observed that wherever an irenical, conciliator}*, 
or catholicizing tendency is visible in the books of the New- 
Testament, it need not be traced to a deliberate intention on 
the part of the writers to effect a compromise between contend- 
ing parties, or to restrain the centrifugal forces in the Church. 
The more probable explanation of such indications is that the 
various parties in the Church were coming gradually to a better 
understanding, and drawing nearer to each other ; and that the 
writers only presented the Christian doctrine in the light in 
which it was coming, more or less generally, to be viewed, 
either in the Church at large or in the circle to which the 
writers belonged. This qualifying remark on the tendency- 
theory applies, to some extent, probably to the section of the 
Epistle to the Romans (ch. xiv.) in which St. Paul seems to 
intend a compromise with his Jewish opponents, and to hold 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 46 I 

out to them the hand of fellowship. He nowhere ceases to 
vindicate the liberty of the Gentile converts ; but in that 
chapter he departs from his generally extreme and uncon- 
ciliatory ground, and seems to admit, in a spirit of larger 
charity and consideration, that Jewish Christians may still 
adhere to the forms of worship inherited by them, even though 
he cannot help regarding it as a mark of the weakness of their 
faith (verse 1) that they should yet attach value to these forms. 
It is conceivable that, in the interval between the letter ad- 
dressed to the Galatians and that addressed to the Romans, 
there may have been years, crowded no doubt with manifold 
experience of the ways and thoughts of men, in which his own 
dogma may have lost for himself somewhat of its angularity ; 
and that that section of the latter epistle was in full accord with 
his own matured conviction, though written also with an ulterior 
and far-off view to the consolidation of the Church. 

Be this as it may, one thing is obvious, viz., that so far as 
any compromise was arrived at, it was effected not by means 
of such formal compacts or agreements as those of which the 
15th chapter of the Acts gives a specimen, but in an informal 
and gradual manner, hardly confessed or observed by the parties 
themselves. The narrative in that chapter is almost certainly 
not strictly historical, but may be regarded as a proof that some 
attempts at compromise and conciliation were made on both 
sides ; or at least that a feeling prevailed in the Church that it 
was desirable that such attempts should be made to come to an 
understanding. When great interests are felt by all parties to 
be at stake, the friction of opinion often leads to mutual under- 
standing and to a settlement of differences for the common 
welfare. That this was the case here, and that the rapprochement 
was effected naturally rather than by such formal compacts as 
that just mentioned, may be inferred from the circumstance that 
that particular compact not only remained inoperative, but is 
rendered historically doubtful by the fact that it is never even 
alluded to on subsequent occasions ; whereas, had its provisions 
been really arrived at, they would have been afterwards ap- 
pealed to for the settlement of the points in dispute. The 
historical data which bear on the subject are few, and some- 
times conflicting ; but indications have been preserved that 
some of the Jewish-Christians, notwithstanding the compromise 
which may have been generally accepted, continued to cling so 



462 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

tenaciously to their supposed privileges as sons of Abraham, 
and to their Mosaic institutions, as to incur the risk of losing 
hold of all that was distinctive in Christianity, and of falling 
back into their old position, and so of being merged once more 
in orthodox Judaism. Certain well-known passages in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews {vide vi. 6) and elsewhere are supposed 
to refer to the danger of such apostasy. On the other hand, 
we may suppose that, even among the Jewish converts, many 
like Paul himself, and under the influence of his teaching, may 
have risen to the level of true Christian liberty ; while others 
may have been conciliated by concessions made by the Gentiles 
to the spirit, if not to the forms of Judaism, and so been retained 
in catholic communion. At all events, in one or other of these 
ways, Jewish Christianity as a separate and irreconcilable form, 
ceased in process of time to create alarm and division in the 
Church. 

The only other remark to be made here is that the way to 
compromise may have been paved and facilitated, if it be the 
case, as suggested by Weizsacker, that the early Church was at 
no time composed entirely of Paulinists and anti-Paulinists ; 
that great numbers of the converts from the first occupied a 
neutral ground between these two sections, and by holding to 
Christianity in its broader aspects became spontaneously and 
insensibly indifferent to the remnants of Jewish forms. Indeed, 
the distinctive Pauline doctrine may be regarded as a polemical 
or controversial makeshift, and never seems in that age to have 
struck deep root into the general Christian consciousness. The 
dialectical form in which it was served up was too artificial and 
fine spun for general comprehension ; and what is still more, 
the spirit of legalism, which under diverse forms was common to 
Jews and Gentiles, was too deep-seated to be eradicated by any 
dialectic, however keen. We find, accordingly, that the Church 
which emerged from the spiritual ferment and asserted itself as 
orthodox and catholic, held to a belief and practice which may 
be described as a compromise between the purely evangelical 
and the legal standpoint. In the canonical post-Pauline 
epistles there is evident a very considerable relaxation of the 
doctrinal formulae by which the Apostle sought to fence the 
evangelical idea. And while the Jewish restrictions were dis- 
carded more and more, the legal spirit survived and devised for 
itself new forms, less unsuitable for symbolizing the universal- 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 463 

istic spirit, under which forms, moreover, the reviving spirit of 
legalism again reared its head, till it received a check at the 
Reformation, and a new episode began in the eternal warfare 
which goes on between the religion of the spirit and the 
religion of the letter. 

We give the above as an approximate representation of the 
course of development in the primitive Church. But without 
dwelling on such considerations, or laying stress on the highly 
probable conjecture of Weizsacker which has led to them, we 
satisfy ourselves with presenting St. Paul as the representative 
figure and prime agent in the great evolution of thought by 
which the first century of the Christian era was distinguished. 

It has now been shown that the unity of the Church was 
imperilled almost from the first by the attitude which the 
Jewish section of the converts assumed towards the Gentile 
section. The former stood upon their national privileges and 
sought to impose the yoke of the law upon the non-Israelitish 
converts. Had they been successful in carrying their point, 
i.e., in excluding from the Christian community all who refused to 
comply with Jewish observances, the effect, as already observed, 
would have been to reduce the community to the position of a 
Jewish sect, to efface its distinctive character, and to arrest its 
further growth. And had they been partially successful, the 
Church would have been rent in twain, and its energies dis- 
sipated in internal conflicts. But this peril was averted by the 
substantial triumph of Paulinism, a result due not so much to 
the powerful dialectic of the Apostle, which was probably under- 
stood and accepted only by a few of his intimate associates, as 
to the intrinsic superiority and inherent force of the new view 
of the religious relation which he advocated, aided as it was by 
his commanding personality and by the energy with which he 
gave utterance to his own sense of spiritual emancipation, 
together with the timely concessions which he and his party 
made to Jewish feelings. The result was also contributed to 
by observation of the conspicuous fact that the gospel as 
preached by St. Paul to those of the uncircumcision produced 
in them all its best fruits and imbued them with its spirit 
(Acts x. 47, xv. 8-1 1 ). The grand spectacle of Gentile 
multitudes " flocking and trooping to the standard of the 
Cross," and without paying homage to the law of Moses, sub- 
mitting to the restraints of a purer faith, could not but astound 



464 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

the Jewish Christians and shake their confidence in the obliga- 
tory nature of their national rites. More than one passage in 
the Acts of the Apostles seems to show that this spectacle had 
made a profound impression, as well it might, on their minds. 
It was probably the argument which weighed most with them 
in restraining their schismatic tendencies and in overcoming 
their repugnance to an association with Gentile believers. 

And, finally, the various causes operating to this end were in 
all probability powerfully reinforced by the logic of a great 
event, viz., the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem by the 
Romans and the compulsory cessation consequent on that 
catastrophe of many of the greater ritual observances. Hap- 
pening at that conjuncture, this catastrophe could not but be 
regarded by many of the Jewish Christians as stamping the 
divine imprimatur on the Pauline view as to the temporary 
validity of the Mosaic law and as to the extinction of Jewish 
privilege. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

POST-PAULINE OR GNOSTIC PERIOD. 

Hardly had the obstacle presented by the conceit of Jewish 
privilege to the growth and stability of the Church been sub- 
stantially overcome before a new obstacle arose, which did not 
indeed grow out of that other, but, as will appear, stood to it in 
some obscure relation of action and reaction. This time the 
obstacle arose in the Gentile section of the Church (though 
not wholly confined to it any more than that other was 
confined to the Jewish section), and consisted in the survival or 
reimportation of habits of life and modes of thought, which 
were essentially Gentile and anti-Christian in character and 
tendency. That, in the rapid propagation of Christianity 
among the Gentiles, such a complication should arise and 
should early become manifest was, in the nature of things, 
inevitable. Lest it should seem, however, that we ante-date 
the rise of Gnosticism, to which we here allude, let it be 
observed that while the great Gnostic writers belonged to the 
middle of the second century, or later, it stands to reason that 
Gnostic tendencies must have prevailed in the Church for many 
decades before they could have been thrown into systematic 
form, and have incurred the censure of heresy. But the whole 
Gnostic movement forms an obscure episode in the history of 
the Church, and will be entered upon here only in so far as 
may be necessary in tracing the contemporaneous development 
of what came to be regarded as the orthodox dogma. 

The leading features of Gnosticism stood in intimate genetic 
connection with the dualistic theory of the universe. According 
to that theory matter was eternal, self-existent, and the source 
or principle of evil, and could be brought under the control of 

2 G 



466 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

God only by the agency of angelic, semi-divine, or intermediate 
spirits ; emanations from the absolute, who would have been 
defiled by immediate contact with matter. As a mode or form 
of theosophic speculation, Gnosticism, in germ if not in name, 
seems to have existed in the east prior to the Christian era, and 
is supposed with reason to have supplied the foreign element 
which gave birth to that sectarian form of Judaism which is 
known as Essenism. And if it be the case, as Bishop Lightfoot 
supposes, that after the destruction of Jerusalem the larger 
number of the Essene profession joined the Christian com- 
munity, they may have carried Gnostic elements with them into 
the Church. This supposition, however, is not necessary to 
account for the entrance of Gnosticism, for we may easily 
believe that the relics of Zoroastrian ideas, which still lingered in 
eastern lands, may have been carried by converts from the east 
into the new faith. But the dualistic thought, which may have 
lain as a germ in pre-Christian Gnosticism, became a developed 
system of thought by the absorption of such elements of 
Christianity as could enter into combination with it. A com- 
promising alliance was thus formed between it and Christianity, 
inimical to the purity and even to the existence of the latter, 
and suggesting to Pauline Christians the necessity of a re- 
statement of Christian doctrine to ward off the danger. 

In practice the dualistic theory led very intelligibly in the 
first instance to asceticism. For, as according to it, matter is 
the principle of evil, the infection of evil can be escaped only 
by avoidance of all contact with matter, and by the mortifica- 
tion, if not the annihilation, of the fleshly nature. But experi- 
ence is hardly needed to show that effort in this direction can 
only be very partially successful, and that, as Bishop Lightfoot 
says, such effort can only " touch the fringe " of the evil ; and 
hence the temptation to fly to the opposite extreme. That is, 
to regard matter as a mere negative ; to treat it with indiffer- 
ence as something which is of no concern, and to follow the 
fleshly impulses of nature without scruple or hesitation. It is 
thus apparent that when matter is regarded as the principle of 
evil there may be but a step from an ascetic to a licentious 
habit of life. It is indeed conceivable that one or both of these 
mischievous extremes might have made their appearance in the 
Church apart from any connection with the dualistic theory, or 
any knowledge or recognition of it. But it is obvious that the 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 467 

prevalence of such a speculation would immensely strengthen 

and aid the diffusion of any tendency in these directions that 
might otherwise exist; and make it a conspicuous and formid- 
able evil. It was a startling phenomenon of this nature in the 
Church which the post-Pauline epistles seek to counteract by 
what may be called an indirect re-statement of the Pauline 
doctrine. 

We adopt here the expression " post-Pauline," or " deutero- 
Pauline," as applied to certain books of the New Testament, 
viz., the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians as well as the 
pastoral Epistles which bear the name of St. Paul, but for 
various reasons are supposed by many not to have been written 
by him, at least in their extant form. The expression is so 
employed by such critics as C. Weizsacker and O. Pfleiderer, and 
others who have satisfied themselves that these epistles were 
written, not by Paul himself, but by men of his school of 
thought, who in post-apostolic times wrote in his name and in 
his spirit, and as much as possible in his style of language. 
But the question may be regarded as still an open one. For 
while the leading living authorities of Germany declare in 
favour of the post-apostolic authorship, the leading authority in 
this country (Lightfoot) takes the opposite view. We agree 
with the former in thinking that this is pre-eminently a question 
in which external evidence or ancient testimony goes for little : 
and in applying the rules of criticism to the internal evidence 
in this investigation, it should be remembered what is often 
forgotten, that far more stress should be laid on the facts which 
tend to show that these epistles are not authentic, than on those 
which point to the Pauline authorship. The pseudonymous 
writer, if such he was, must evidently have been a Paulinist of 
high intellect, familiar with St. Paul's style of thought and 
language, who did his utmost to imitate that style and to enter 
into the conditions and circumstances under which the Apostle 
wrote. This, by no means improbable supposition, is of itself 
sufficient to account for many Pauline features or touches in 
these epistles. Whereas, in the case of a man so strenuously 
individualistic as St. Paul was, both in thought and expression, 
it is hard to conceive that he should have penned a single 
sentence without stamping it with the impress of his mind ; so 
that any lapse or departure from his style may fairly be held 
to form a presumption that he was not the author. 



468 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Further, it may be observed that the polemic in these epistles 
is directed not against the legalism against which St. Paul 
waged war, but partly against asceticism and partly against 
lawless license, to both of which the Gnostic sects were 
addicted, and both of which were inconsistent with the 
principles of Christianity. That, in view of these Gnostic 
tendencies, these epistles, if they do not exhibit a change of 
front, yet occupy a position different from that occupied by 
St. Paul in his great epistles, is plain. And the question 
whether it was the Apostle himself, or men of his school at a 
later period, who made this advance, depends for its answer 
partly on the verdict of the literary criticism applied to these 
epistles, but mainly on the chronology of the Gnostic systems 
against which their polemic is directed. This chronological 
question may not admit of being conclusively settled ; but the 
probability seems to be that the Gnostic element intruded itself 
into the Christian sphere and became a flagrant evil, so as to 
postulate an advance in doctrine on the ethical side, or rather 
another form of its statement, only after the first enthusiasm of 
the Church had cooled down and the terms of Christian member- 
ship had become relaxed ; by which time St. Paul had dis- 
appeared from the scene. The supposition that men of the 
Apostle's school might write in his name will not appear 
strange to those who take into account the many instances of 
a similar procedure in the literary history both of Jewish and 
of Christian antiquity. Still less will it appear strange if we 
also take into account the unsatisfactory condition in which St. 
Paul had left his doctrine in his authentic epistles, and which 
the rise and spread of Gnosticism must have brought sensibly 
and painfully under the observation of some of the more clear- 
sighted among his disciples. At the risk, therefore, of some 
repetition of what has been already said, we shall here 
endeavour to show that St. Paul's doctrine was open to mis- 
construction, so as to form a motive and inducement to the 
composition of post-Pauline literature, in which a warning 
against the errors of Gnosticism should have a conspicuous 
place. 

And first, in regard to the ascetic habits of the Gnostic 
sects. It is obvious that no reproof or correction of these wa 
administered by anything which St. Paul had said agains 
Pharisaic restrictions : for such restrictions were based on the 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 469 

obligation of obedience to the statutory law of Israel : whereas 
the asceticism of the sects not only went far beyond the legal 
observances, but were based on the dualistic idea, with which 
the Jew had no sympathy ; besides that it " condemned the 
gratification of the natural cravings in every form, as if these 
were evil in themselves." It may even be affirmed that some 
expressions in St. Paul's epistles might be understood or mis- 
understood, as giving countenance to ascetic doctrine, as, for 
instance, what he says in regard to virginity and the married 
state; whereas no loophole is left for any such misunder- 
standing in the deutero-Pauline epistles, which expressly 
declare that " every creature of God is good, and nothing to be 
refused, if it be received with thanksgiving''' (1 Tim. iv. 4). 
These and many other words in these epistles condemn, as 
contrary to the spirit of the gospel, every requirement that 
would unnecessarily curtail the liberty of the Christian ; and 
every doctrine that would substitute asceticism for self-discip- 
line, or confound the one with the other. # 

In these same epistles there is an obvious purpose of 
protesting against that other and far more flagrant evil, the 
unbridled license to which there was a tendency in the Gnostic 
sects. If asceticism was due in part to an imperfect ap- 
prehension of Pauline Christianity, the doctrine which gave 
encouragement to licentiousness was a complete perversion of 
the liberty which St. Paul proclaimed : yet it can hardly be 
questioned that the Apostle's doctrine of justification, by faith 
alone, invited, or at least gave opening to this perversion. Much 
of his argumentation on the subject of Christian liberty was 
hardly intelligible, or, so far as intelligible, not very convincing 
either to Jew or Gentile, and witnessed more to the might and 
ardour of his genius than to the lucidity of his thought. His 
dialectic was not calculated to make clear the nature of that 
deliverance from the Mosaic or statutory law, of which he was in- 

* In his dissertation on the " Colossian Heresy," Bishop Lightfoot treats 
of this subject with admirable clearness ; and his remarks (from which wc 
have derived much assistance) are all well deserving of attention, if we 
except the distinction which he draws between the "asceticism of 
dualism" and the "asceticism of self-discipline." This does not seem to 
be a happy distinction. What he understands by the latter is not 
asceticism at all, but simply self-discipline or self-denial ; and his language 
is calculated to confound things which are essentially distinct. 



470 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

wardly conscious, and for which he so resolutely contended. His 
manipulation of Old Testament history, in order to find in it a 
proof of the temporary obligation of the law, and to represent 
the law as blocking the way to the fulfilment of the promise 
made to the fathers, is not very satisfactory. His endeavour 
to combat Judaism with weapons drawn from its own armoury 
could only be partially satisfactory even to those who, like 
himself, were acquainted with Pharisaic theology, or satisfied 
with the current Rabbinical dialectic, by which his own mind 
had been saturated. Indeed, it could only satisfy the scruples 
or silence the objections of those who, like himself, had reached 
the idea of Christian liberty by quite another avenue : who, in 
a manner, did not need to be convinced, but accepted his 
argument as a good answer to those who were contentious, and 
pragmatically captious. 

The doctrine by which the Apostle sought to explain, to 
himself and to the Church at large, that freedom from the 
Mosaic law of which he was instinctively conscious, was, as 
already said, the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which 
was but the necessary deduction from vicarious atonement and 
imputed righteousness. Now it is obvious that this doctrine, 
literally understood and carried out to its consequences 
(whether legitimate or not, we need not say), involved a 
danger to the cause of religion, as being apt to bring about its 
divorce from morality ; and it may have been owing to the two 
causes now mentioned, viz., the obscurity of the Apostle's 
reasoning, and the ethical danger to which it was apt to give 
occasion, that this Pauline doctrine was laid aside, or thrown 
into the background in the Epistle to the Hebrews and in the 
deutero-Pauline epistles, which represent the post-apostolic 
phase of theological thought. No one can read these epistles 
with anything like attention without being struck by the fact 
that, to say the least, the accent is removed from that doctrine ; 
and, omitting other points, that love and other Christian graces 
divide the field with faith in the mind of the writers, as being 
co-ordinate in value and alike essential to a justified state. 
The explanation given of this very noticeable fact by some of 
the Protestant theologians, who have discriminated between the 
doctrinal conceptions of the various writers of the New Testa- 
ment, is that it is the sign of a falling away from the high 
idealism of the great Apostle of the Gentiles : a sort of relapse 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 47 I 

• 
into the Judaistic form of doctrine, which, though assailed by 

him, yet gained ground, and finally established itself in the 
Catholic Church. But others, such as C. Weizsacker and O. 
Pfleiderer, regard this difference as due to a natural and 
necessary development or correction of the Pauline doctrine, in 
which the Pharisaic-juristic element has fallen into the back- 
ground, and the ethical, Hellenic element of the doctrine is 
accentuated. To ourselves, it seems as if these two explana- 
tions may be brought together and reconciled by taking into 
account a tendency of all striking and original thought, or of 
what is sometimes called " high doctrine," such as that of the 
Apostle. The tendency of all such thought is to assert itself at 
first without qualification: to assume a polemical or antagonistic 
attitude towards antecedent or current thought in the same 
walk, and to allow no weight to the latter ; whereas afterwards, 
under the teaching of experience and the ordeal of criticism, or 
on better consideration, it yields to the necessity of observing a 
more conciliatory and moderate tone, so as to square with the 
realities of life, and to fall into its proper but more unobtrusive 
place in the general system of thought. Be this as it may, it 
would certainly seem that the specific, polemical form of the 
Apostle's doctrine had lost for the post-apostolic Church what- 
ever interest or significance it had ever had, and that the 
Gentile section, being now the larger and ever increasing 
majority, had laid aside its deference for the Jewish minority, 
and felt itself freed from subjection to the law, independently 
of St. Paul's controversial dialectic. His special form of 
doctrine thus gave way to a less antinomistic, but more 
intelligible, popular, and guarded form, which is presented in 
the deutero-Pauline epistles, and in several non-canonical 
writings of the same period. 

According to the theory or conjecture advanced in a former 
part of this discussion, St. Paul, in his first enthusiasm, adopted 
the idea of justification by faith alone, but before writing his 
epistle to the Galatians, he had been taught by his pastoral 
experience the necessity of qualifying this doctrine, and, while 
still retaining the formula, had made it to square with that 
experience, by giving such an extension to the word " faith " as 
to include something more than a historical or intellectual per- 
suasion of the truth of the evangelical doctrine, viz., a self- 
surrender to the method of Jesus, and a self-conformity to his 



472 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

• 
life. By this extension of the word, the formula of the 

Apostle did, indeed, lose much or all of its paradoxical signi- 
ficance, inasmuch as " faith " so extended is presumptive, or, as 
we have already said, inclusive of the entire Christian life. But 
by such extension of it, the Apostle showed, at least, that he 
recognized and sought to obviate the danger which was involved 
in the literal acceptation of his formula. 

This expedient, however, was not sufficient. So long as the 
formula was retained, there was ever a danger that the word 
" faith " would revert to its original and literal meaning, and 
hence we find that, effectually to obviate the danger from this 
source, the deutero-Pauline writers (in this, no doubt, giving 
expression to a general feeling in the Church) drop the formula 
entirely, and speak of faith as " the evidence of things not seen " 
(Heb. xi. i), that is, a persuasion of the existence of the spiritual 
world in opposition to the materialistic habit of mind, or simply 
as a moral intellectual trust in God, and, therefore, as only one 
of many graces, all equally necessary to the Christian life. In 
this way faith lost its pre-eminence, or, at least, its sole-sufficiency 
for justification. In these same epistles Christ is represented as 
an object of meditation and affection, and an ideal of human 
endeavour, more than as an object of faith ; and his person rather 
than his death becomes for the disciple the point of vision and 
the centre of regard. The dangerous consequences or tenden- 
cies of St. Paul's doctrine were thus averted, and the Church was 
gradually prepared for the reception of the later or Johannine 
theology ; that is, for the representation of Christ as a personal 
revelation of the divine mind, and an embodiment of the human 
ideal. 

But neither the formula of St. Paul, as qualified by himself, 
nor the more guarded doctrine of the deutero-Pauline epistles, 
sufficed to obviate the antinomian interpretation of Christian 
liberty, nor to create a barrier to the Gnostic movement, which 
took up into itself, and sought to give theoretic expression to 
the antinomian tendency to pervert that doctrine. The tendency 
in that direction had its deeper root indeed in common human 
nature, but was,, without doubt, very much encouraged by the 
circumstance that in one of its aspects it was eminently 
anti-Judaic, a reaction against Jewish Christianity. The attitude 
of exclusiveness and of assumption on the part of Jewish 
Christians, while powerfully calculated to impose upon the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 4/3 

minds of some among the Gentile converts, as we see in the 
early case of the Galatian Church (Gal. iii. 5, v. I., etc.), would 
be resented by others as obstructive, and call forth a feeling of 
antagonism, and an over-emphatic assertion of evangelic liberty. 
The Pauline assertion of this principle would be misunderstood 
and carried to excess. And though the evangelic principle 
which differentiated Christianity from Judaism might in many 
minds be not less powerful and energetic, though it was not 
theoretically understood ; yet, just because of this defect of 
understanding, many in the Church would be disposed to adopt 
the most violent means to prevent a relapse into Judaism ; to 
rid themselves of a troublesome, irritating and embarrassing 
controversy, and to make the breach between the Church and 
the synagogue as wide as possible. 

From the preceding remarks we may see that the doctrines 
of justification by faith alone, and of Christian liberty, which 
to the Apostle seemed to be legitimate inferences from the 
death of the Messiah, viewed in the light of his own personal 
experience, were not, even as expounded and safeguarded by 
him, adapted to the comprehension of an ordinary judgment, 
and invited, or at least admitted, of a construction which men 
of speculative, and still more, of licentious minds, were ready to 
put upon them ; and such interpretation was also recommended 
by its seeming to cut the knot which the Apostle had but 
partially succeeded in untying. It was no easy matter, after 
all he had urged, to understand in what relative sense the 
obligation of a God-given law could be done away ; or wherein 
the difference lay, which St. Paul had laboured to point out, 
between that " lawlessness which was moral, and that lawless- 
ness which was immoral." To make this clear, there was 
required an amount of explanation and an expenditure of 
reasoning which was too subtle and involved, for the compre- 
hension of common minds : a fact which probably drew forth 
the remark made in the Gnostic era, that there were in his 
epistles " some things hard to be understood, which the)' that 
are unlearned and unstable wrest, . . . unto their own 
destruction" (2 Peter iii. 16). That freedom from the limitations 
of the statutory law which the Apostle asserted was apt to be 
regarded as an absolute emancipation from all law whatever. 
And even those who had little leaning to Gnosticism might be 
inclined to adopt some short and easy method, such as it 



474 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

afforded, of severing the connection between Judaism and 
Christianity, betwixt law and gospel ; and to get rid of dialect- 
ical subtleties, by pushing the Pauline doctrine to an extreme, 
and so to fall into that antinomianism in theory, and that 
libertinism in practice, which (sometimes strangely but intel- 
ligibly enough varied with asceticism) were more or less 
characteristic of the Gnostic sects. This was a very natural 
issue. for men who had been accustomed to Gentile looseness of 
life, and was exactly what took place in other spiritual crises of 
a similar kind, as for example at the period of the Reformation 
in the 1 6th century, when the excesses of the Anabaptists 
and other sectaries were indirectly due to those same doctrines 
of Christian liberty, revived in the Church by Luther. 
Neither the Reformer nor the Apostle was able to give lucid 
expression to a distinction of which both were yet profoundly 
sensible ; and neither the one nor the other is responsible for 
the excesses which followed his teaching. 

Attention has thus been called to the modification which the 
Pauline soteriology underwent in the deutero-Pauline or post- 
apostolic epistles. And we proceed now to call attention to 
the development which St. Paul's Christology underwent, as 
against the Gnostic doctrine in these same epistles. As 
notwithstanding his earnest ethical spirit, St. Paul's prominent 
principle of justification by faith alone was so involved in 
controversial subtleties as to be liable to perversion, so his 
Christology was left by him in a state so unfinished and 
indefinite as to call imperatively, not indeed for correction like 
his soteriological doctrine, but for further definition. And this 
definition was undertaken or carried out in diverse directions : 
the one of w r hich, as we shall yet see, led on ultimately to the 
Christology of the fourth Gospel, and came to be regarded as 
orthodox, while the other or Gnostic definition was earh 
stigmatized as heretical. And if it here be asked in passing 
how we are entitled to use such epithets, or, which is the same 
thing, how a section of the Church was able to vindicate its 
claim to be considered orthodox ; or yet again, how the 
doctrines called orthodox got the upper hand in the Church : 
we may answer shortly that the triumphant doctrines were 
those which appealed most powerfully to the sentiment or 
consciousness awakened among men by the gospel, and were 
most in harmony with its leading principles. We shall find 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 4/5 

that that doctrine which aggrandized, not that which derogated 
from the name and nature of Christ ; that which added to his 
glory, and exalted the enthusiasm of his followers, was that 
which prevailed, because it possessed the strength derived from 
consistency with the evangelic principle in the dogmatic form 
impressed upon it by St. Paul. This, after contending for a 
longer or shorter period on apparently equal terms with the 
competing doctrines, would at length inevitably prevail, and be 
confidently stamped as orthodox by its adherents. 

That period in the history of the early Church, which wit- 
nessed the further definition of Pauline Christology, may best be 
introduced to the notice of the reader by adverting to a very 
notable circumstance connected with the conversion of the 
Gentiles, viz., that wherever the Gospel was received by them, 
the old polytheism disappeared, almost without a blow being 
directly aimed at it, or without an attempt being made to 
demonstrate its irrationality and folly. The doctrine of St. 
Paul was not of a negative nature ; he did not lay himself out 
to impugn the polytheistic system. His discourses at Lystra and 
at Athens, as recorded in Acts xiv. and xvii., and his language 
in the opening of his Epistle to the Romans are exceptional ; 
but we may infer even from these that he impugned the 
polytheistic doctrine and worship only in a cursory and 
incidental fashion. The " Word of the Cross," which formed 
his main and primary, if not sole, topic of address (i Cor. ii. 2), 
was a call to the Gentiles to change their mode of life, and to 
believe that the Son of God had died for the sins of men. 
This was the true and only instrument of their conversion, and 
it seemed as if they could not embrace or give " an entrance " 
to this message, without " turning from idols to serve the living- 
God " (1 Thess. i. 9). The doctrine which was sufficient for 
the conversion of the Jews was also sufficient for the conversion 
of the Gentiles. 

The explanation of this remarkable circumstance ma}' be 
found in the historical fact that, at the introduction of 
Christianity and for many preceding ages, faith in the heathen 
pantheon had been undermined by the corrosive effect of ideas 
which had been set afloat far and wide by the schools of Greek 
philosophy. That faith still retained its hold of the great 
masses of the people as a superstition or survival of a past 
phase of thought, but had lost its living power over their minds. 



476 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

while the cultured classes only observed its forms by way of 
paying respect to popular feeling. The whole fabric of super- 
stition and of expediency combined was ready to dissolve at 
the first contact with a living faith. The Jewish people had, it 
is true, for many ages been possessed of the monotheistic belief, 
and it might have been expected that the faith of which they 
were the not unfaithful guardians might have spread to other 
people ; but in spite of their proselytizing zeal, little compara- 
tively seems to have been effected by them in this direction. 
The monotheistic faith as presented by them to the Gentiles 
had somewhat of the weakness of a mere negation ; and the 
particularism and legalism with which it was associated in their 
minds was an obstacle to its diffusion through their means. It 
needed to be detached and set free from the limitations of 
Judaism before it could make way among surrounding nations. 
For these could not possibly be attracted by a faith which was 
seen to be consistent with a narrow exclusiveness, besides being 
connected with a peculiarly burdensome ceremonial and a 
repulsive rite of initiation. 

Jesus it was who, by his direct appeal to the moral instincts, 
by his doctrine of the Heavenly Father, and of the better 
righteousness, first broke through the limitations of Judaism. 
By the necessity of his situation, however, or by a wise accom- 
modation to circumstances, his personal teaching was confined 
chiefly, if not entirely, to his own countrymen. 

But St. Paul, to whom a wider field was laid open, discerned 
the universalistic possibilities and significance of the doctrine, 
and brought it to bear in its dogmatic form upon the Gentile 
peoples. He appealed directly to their moral sense and to 
that craving for deliverance from evil which is common to all 
men ; and instead of entering upon a laboured refutation of 
their polytheistic ideas, and upon the evidences of the divine 
unity by way of laying a foundation for the doctrine of redemp- 
tion, he proceeded on the directly opposite method of com- 
mencing at once with the latter doctrine. In listening to the 
Apostle's appeal, the individual heathen came to himself, 
touched the deepest ground of his being, and was placed face 
to face with his own higher nature — the essential divinity within 
him. This was felt by him instinctively to be the highest auth- 
ority to which he was amenable, and he was thereby released 
from allegiance to all authority lower than this, the highest. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 477 

In his worship of' the gods, the Gentile was always more or 
less conscious that these beings, merely because they were 
many, could not be supreme ; that there was a mysterious 
power or fate over and behind them ; and we have the testimony 
of an ancient author that in moments of supreme danger or 
sudden alarm, men turned involuntarily and instinctively from 
these inferior deities to address that awful Power. This observa- 
tion makes it intelligible how the simple announcement of the 
gospel, that, in God over all, men had a common Father in 
heaven, might be all that was needed to produce a crisis in 
their spiritual life and to satisfy them at one and the same 
moment of the vanity (Acts xiv. 15) of all worship not 
addressed to the One God. This effect of St. Paul's preaching 
upon the Gentiles is well illustrated by the experience of the 
Moravian missionaries in Greenland, where little or no effect 
was produced so long as they continued to discuss preliminary 
themes, such as the unity of God, the evidences of religion, and 
the facts of Bible history ; but where success began to attend 
their efforts so soon as they appealed directly to the con- 
sciences of their hearers and made to them the offer of salva- 
tion in the name of the crucified Son of God. 

It might now have been expected that, as time went on, this 
same result would continue to follow the spread of the gospel. 
x^nd such, we may be sure, was the case with individuals and 
with populations in which polytheism had been previously dis- 
credited by the influence of Greek philosophy and other 
dissolvents of superstition. But in the case of others who had 
had the benefit of no such preparatory discipline or dis- 
illusionment, an instantaneous revolution of opinion could 
hardly be expected. It is possible that individuals here and 
there who had been profoundly touched by the message of the 
gospel, even though they had had the benefit of no such 
experience, might yet undergo a sudden and complete revolu- 
tion of opinion and character. But nothing of the kind could 
possibly take place either actually or seemingly in the case of 
great masses of men. Old habits of thought and action would 
still survive and reassert themselves after the new principle had 
taken root, and would long maintain their ground in spite of it, 
and alongside of it. The new would for a time enter into 
combination with the old and would gradually overpower it, or 
be overpowered by it ; or a resultant form of faith would be 



478 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

evolved, which for a time would satisfy men's minds. It has 
been said by Professor Huxley, and we believe with truth, 
" that there is probably as much sheer fetichism among the 
Roman populace (of Southern Italy) now as there was 1 800 
years ago." In Southern Europe the pagan form of idolatry 
has been succeeded by what may be called a Christian form of 
idolatry, and the lands there have not been perfectly Christian- 
ized to this day. The ancient polytheistic ideas have survived 
under a Christian mask. We suppose, indeed, that to thorough- 
going Roman Catholics, such as Cardinal Newman, for whom 
" the religious character of Catholic countries was no prejudice 
to the sanctity of the Church," this circumstance will give little 
concern. But the fact that such a state of things has continued 
for so many ages, enables us the better to understand how it 
was possible for pagan ideas and practices to enter into com- 
bination with Christianity so soon after its birth, or at the very 
moment of its birth, into the world. On a retrospect of Church 
history it becomes evident that what is called the Catholic 
Church was founded on a compromise between Christian and 
ethnic principles, as well as between Jewish and Christian 
principles ; and that in the end it was moulded by fusion with 
the ideal principles of Christianity of many foreign and disparate 
elements, Jewish and Gentile. But at the outset, or at the 
post-apostolic period of which we now speak, this combination 
on the part of the converts was attempted in a manner and to 
an extent so wholesale and unrespecting as to threaten to 
subvert the character of the Church entirely, and to hurl it back 
into the gulf of heathenism. The Church grew and multiplied 
so rapidly that the influx of Gentile elements could only be 
imperfectly assimilated, and for a time it almost seemed as if 
in some regions these elements would prevail over those which 
were distinctively Christian. 

Besides the anti-Judaic aspect of the Gnostic heresy, to which 
reference has been made, we have also to consider what may be 
called its polytheistic aspect, by which is meant the revival in 
it of a tendency common to all the Gentile nations, and of 
which many of the Gentile converts had not got rid, the 
tendency towards daemonism — that is, to conceive of the interval 
between the finite and the Infinite as peopled with ranks of 
intermediate spirits or angelic beings, executants of the divine 
purposes ; partakers, more or less, of the divine nature and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 479 

objects of popular worship. This tendency revived anion"" the 
Gentile converts, no doubt mainly by virtue of the force of 
heredity ; but its revival may also have been owing in part to 
the anti-Judaic bias, already mentioned, of these converts, or to 
the fact that it seemed to them to suggest a proof of the 
transient nature of the Jewish dispensation, more intelligible 
than either St. Paul or the writer to the Hebrews had been 
able to give ; a ready means, therefore, of cutting away the 
ground from under Jewish assumption, and of quashing an in- 
convenient and embarrassing controversy which threatened to 
be otherwise interminable. For after all that had been said in 
vindication of Christian liberty, the Jewish Christians could still 
take their stand upon the fact, if it were the fact, that their law 
had been given by God Himself, and must be eternally valid. 
This was a consideration which was difficult to meet, and it was 
only by resorting to some violent expedient that it could be set 
aside. The Gnostic expedient for this purpose could only have 
recommended itself to men in whom the tendency towards 
daemonism was yet strong. It consisted in the position that the 
God of Israel, who had created the world and given the law 
from Mount Sinai, was not the Supreme God or the Heavenly 
Father whom Jesus had revealed, but an inferior divinity, who, 
if not positively evil, was at best a just and righteous, or, it 
might be a severe and jealous Being, according to many of the 
representations given of Jehovah in the Old Testament. He 
was the demiurge, one of a countless number of aeons, or 
angelic semi-divine ministers of the Supreme Power, whose law 
was no longer binding upon men ; while Christ as Redeemer 
was regarded as one of the same order of Beings, whose office 
was to declare the will of the Heavenly Father, and to deliver 
mankind from the evil inherent in the imperfect creation of the 
demiurge. 

In practice the combination of the dualistic principle with 
Christianity led, as we have already seen, to the introduction 
into the Church, by alternate lines of thought, of asceticism and 
unbridled license. But doctrinally it led to highly derogatory 
views of the person and work of Christ ; for Gnosticism could 
find a place for these in its various systems only by regarding 
him as one of those intermediate spirits, and his work of 
redemption as a cosmical or metaphysical rather than a moral 
process. This was the form of false doctrine which the deutero- 



480 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Pauline writers have in view. Of allusion to such speculative 
errors not a trace is to be found in St. Paul's great epistles. 
But the writers just mentioned could not but know that in 
condemning such doctrines they " had the mind" of Paul. Not 
that the Apostle actually excluded all speculation from his 
system ; for, if we lay aside our preconceived notions, we must 
admit that his dogma is neither more nor less than a speculation 
grounded on the death and resurrection of the Messiah. But 
these writers knew that, had the Apostle lived to see specula- 
tions, not so grounded, but resting on quite other foundations, 
mixing themselves with Christianity and claiming to be received 
as Christianity, he would not only have resolved to know 
nothing of them (i Cor. ii. 2), but would also have pronounced 
upon them his anathema. For of such speculations it might be 
said that they did not " hold the head from which all the body 
(of Christian doctrine) . . . increaseth with the increase of 
God." Such an increase or development on the other hand 
did the deutero-Pauline writers deem that they gave to Paul's 
doctrine (Col. ii. 19 ; Eph. iv. 15-16). And this persuasion on 
their part was probably what seemed to them and to their 
school, or section of the Church generally, to justify them in 
prefixing St. Paul's name to their epistles. 

To conceive how the fantastic systems of Gnosticism could 
possibly spring up, it has to be borne in mind that the age was 
eminently eclectic. Ideas of the most heterogeneous character 
were afloat in the intellectual atmosphere, as mere membra 
disjecta^ without any tendency in that empirical and uncreative 
age to coalesce into organic unity. And the appearance of 
Christianity as a new power in human life and a new element 
of thought was what drew these materials together, and supplied 
a cementing principle. Some of these, derived from Greek 
philosophy, were more or less consonant to the genius of 
Christianity, and helped its dogmatic construction. But 
Christianity had begun to attract general attention as a phe- 
nomenon of world-wide significance, so that it could not be 
ignored, and even ideas that were alien to it in character sought 
to place themselves in connection with it. In this way we 
explain to ourselves the rise of the Gnostic systems. To many 
more or less cultivated minds, weary of the intellectual monotony 
and uncertainty, Christianity seemed to be of the nature of a 
new datum, which might possibly supply the solution of cosmo- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 48 I 

logical problems, hitherto insoluble. Its facts and dogmas 
would be eagerly laid hold of by many, as new factors of 
thought ; combined with pre-existing elements, and formed with 
them into strange compounds, all of them having a family like- 
ness of a dualistic-theosophic character. 

Many in that age would be attracted by the religious ideas 
involved in Christian dogma without being deeply penetrated 
by their spirit, and without that true insight into their nature 
which can be gained only from within by those who adopt 
them as a rule of life and experience their renovating power. 
In such individuals the speculative and intellectual interest 
would predominate over the practical and religious, and the 
great soteriological and Christological ideas would be valued, 
chiefly in the hope that they would be found to shed new light 
and bring order into the existing chaos of thought. Others, 
again, there would be, in whom the religious or Christian 
interest would be more pronounced ; and who would seek, by 
means of independent thought, to reach a speculative Gnosis or 
higher insight into Christianity than was derivable from Pauline 
dogma ; and to draw out of it some universal theory of life or 
to assign to it its proper place in the general system of 
human knowledge ; in a word, to gratify a curiosity which 
Pauline dogma had left unsatisfied, and to supply the specu- 
lative relations of doctrines which interested the genuine 
Christian consciousness only in their practical aspects. 

Christianity was presented to the Gentiles at the first only as 
a soteriological intervention in the affairs of men, of which 
Christ was the instrument and agent. The great Apostle had 
said little or nothing as to the functions, if any, which Christ 
discharged with respect to the general order, or to the universe 
at large. According to him, Christ was indeed Son of God, 
as well as Son of Man. He had also been pre-existent 
(Phil. ii. 6, 7 ; 2 Cor. viii. 9 ), and his mission was to reveal 
the will of God and to reconcile the world to God. But all 
the powers entrusted to him for this purpose were limited in 
extent and in duration. As if afraid that the monotheistic 
idea might be compromised by the dominion and authority 
which he ascribed to Christ, the Apostle, in a well-known 
passage (1 Cor. xv. 24), declares, somewhat to the surprise of 
his readers, that the high estate and authority of Christ is only 
provisional and temporary, that his dominion will come to an 

2 H 



482 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

end, and he himself be openly reduced to that state of sub- 
ordination which is common to all beings. The Apostle 
conceives of Christ as the divine plenipotentiary with delegated 
powers for the present aeon ; but when his great redemptive 
work is accomplished he will lay his authority down that God 
may be all in all. 

The Christian consciousness could not be satisfied with the 
idea that the divine functions exercised by Christ should thus 
be confined to the affairs of men or to the accomplishment of the 
work of redemption. It could hardly but be felt, as time went on, 
that even to perform these functions satisfactorily and without 
fail, Christ must be endowed permanently with the powers of 
universal regiment. A feeling of this kind probably found 
expression in the concluding words of the Lord's prayer which 
originally formed no part of it, and were probably added in 
post-apostolic or Gnostic times, when the feeling prevailed 
that nothing short of cosmical functions could carry out the 
soteriological purpose of God. Beyond the domain of re- 
demption in its more restricted sense there was a province 
in which thought might expatiate, and by penetrating to the 
depths of this region, i.e., to the universal and metaphysical 
relations of Christianity, a deeper Gnosis of its nature might be 
reached. A problem was thus evidently presented, which 
demanded a further definition than St. Paul had given of 
the Christological dogma. It seems, indeed, as if the Apostle 
himself had a presentiment that his converts might call for 
some definition beyond that which he deemed sufficient for 
practical need. So much may be inferred from his accom- 
modation of Deut. xxx. 12-14 to describe the righteousness 
which is of faith : " Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend 
into heaven ? (that is, to bring Christ down from above :) 
Or, Who shall descend into the deep ? (that is, to bring up 
Christ again from the dead.) But what saith it ? The word 
is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart ; that is, 
the word of faith, which we preach : That if thou shalt con- 
fess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe ii 
thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thoi 
shalt be saved " (Rom. x. 6-9). With much else that these 
words have been thought to imply, this may be ranked, the 
to inquire into matters beyond the gospel as preached by Si 
Paul was a thing of trespass and of dangerous consequence, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 483 

to be carefully abstained from. But it was hardly to be 
expected that all the Apostle's converts would agree to respect 
the limit which he wished to impose upon their search into the 
deep things of God. And the fact was that many did soon 
break through that limit and embark in speculations which 
were necessarily fantastic, because wholly divorced from the 
ground of Christian experience, and wholly at variance with 
the sober practical spirit of religion as it appeared in the simple 
doctrine of Jesus, or even in the circumscribed and self- 
restrained dogma of St. Paul. While the latter ran parallel 
with the Apostle's personal experience, and was thus kept free 
from everything in the shape of unpractical and extravagant 
speculation, the Gnostic doctrine on the other hand ran riot, 
just because it acknowledged no such limiting guidance or con- 
trol, and gave the rein to polytheistic fancies. A nomenclature 
was even invented or adopted from oriental mythologies for 
those imaginary spirits which were supposed to surround the 
Throne of the Eternal, and a place among them was assigned 
to Christ. For Gnostic thought, Christ was one of an inter- 
mediate order of beings, godlike in nature, and ministers of the 
divine purpose ; a docetic representation in human form of a 
shadowy divine energy ; or he was the temporal double of a 
godlike being who had existed in the spiritual world along 
with countless others in the depths of eternity. By placing 
him on a level with such beings the sects no doubt thought to 
exalt him : it was their mode of defining his nature ; but in 
reality this " co-ordination " of him with a crowd of such beings 
had the effect of " derogating " from his dignity and depriving 
him of pre-eminence for the Christian consciousness, and of 
that exclusive claim to adoration which was assigned to him 
by St. Paul and the early Church. For, in apostolic 
Christianity, though his nature was not defined, and was to 
some extent limited, he yet stood alone and supreme to the 
Christian consciousness by reason of his redemptive function, 
so that the Gnostic solution could not satisfy its requirements. 
And yet, while for Gnostic thought, Christ lost his supremacy 
for the religious consciousness, extension was given to the 
functions which he was supposed to discharge. The fruitful 
idea of redemption was retained, but transformed from an 
ethical into a cosmical process. And the practical spiritual 
aspect of that idea, if not entirely lost sight of, was at least 



484 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

thrown into the background, and the religious relations of 
humanity were absorbed or merged in the metaphysical. 

The Gnostic systems seem to have greatly differed in details. 
But the tendency common to all of them was to generalize and 
to refine away the positive contents of Christianity, to set aside 
Pauline Christology by substituting in its place a fantastic 
purely imaginary scheme of the invisible world, and to repre- 
sent Christ not so much as the author of human salvation, as 
the restorer of the world order, and so to distract the mind of 
the Church, to shift and unsettle the foundations of the faith, and 
to remove Christianity further and further from the practical 
into the speculative sphere. Yet these systems , fantastical as 
they were, and absolutely destitute of any real basis in the 
Christian consciousness and the ethical nature of man, were 
so fascinating to large numbers, who, though included in the 
Christian pale, were only semi-Christian, as to spread rapidly 
over Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and other provinces, and 
threaten to prove disastrous to the infant Church by destroying 
its moral influence, effecting its disintegration, and causing it 
to subside or to revert into a new form of polytheism or 
dsemonism. The danger from this cause was so imminent, that 
a feeling of universal alarm was created in those sections of 
the Church which held fast to the dogmatic form in which 
Paul and his disciples had cast the doctrine. 

We have hitherto spoken of Gnosticism as due to the 
intrusion into Pauline doctrine of foreign and disparate ele- 
ments of thought ; but we may here remark, that it may also 
have been due in some measure to the endeavour to follow up 
Pauline ideas beyond the limits within which the interests of 
practical religion and the Christian consciousness could act as 
guides to thought. According to one mode of viewing it, in- 
deed, Pauline dogma is itself a species of Gnosis or speculation 
on the facts or experience of Christian life. But, without 
entering upon this view, we may say at least that, in the best 
authenticated epistles of St. Paul, there occur modes of reason- 
ing, and germs of thought, which in a developed or exaggerated 
form reappeared in the heretic Gnostic systems, and possibly 
gave to these a cue, and contributed to their rise. In the 
Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and in that to the Galatians, 
and elsewhere, there are striking examples of that so-called 
spiritual or allegorical mode of interpreting the Old Testament, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 4H5 

which consists in setting aside the historical connection and the 
grammatical sense, to make way for a less obvious and deeper 
sense, of which the words may admit. See Gal. iii. 16, iv. 22 : 
1 Cor. x. 4, etc. In these and a few other cases, the exegesis of 
the Old Testament is arbitrary, far fetched, and fantastic in the 
highest degree ; or is such, at least, as would not be tolerated at 
the present day. Apostolic sanction was thus given to a 
so-called spiritual or mystical use of Scripture, to which 
theologians in all ages are naturally prone, and of which the 
Gnostic system-mongers largely availed themselves. 

Further, there occur in St. Paul's epistles, certain isolated 
and cursory statements which these same teachers worked into 
their systems, and carried out to their natural consequences, 
with the result of well-nigh subverting the essential principles 
of the gospel. According to the Apostle, the law was or- 
dained by angels in the hand of a mediator (Moses) : a 
proposition which, as understood by Gnostic teachers, was 
extended to the creation and government of the world, so as 
obviously to lend countenance to daemonism. In this con- 
nection it may be noted, that the Pauline epistle to the 
Hebrews set a grand example of typological interpretation, 
which was not lost upon the Gnostic teachers : the government 
of the present world by angels and intermediate spirits which 
that epistle seems to imply, must also have served to give 
impulse and suggestion to kindred ideas in their systems. The 
distinction which is drawn in this same epistle (v. 1 I -vi. 1 ) 
between the saving and elementary faith which is common to 
all Christians, and that Gnosis which characterizes and distin- 
guishes a more perfect state, was an idea which came largely 
into play in Gnostic doctrine. The typological interpretation 
of Scripture which the writer apparently had in view, when he 
exhorted his readers " to leave the principles of the doctrine of 
Christ, and to go on unto perfection," might naturally be 
regarded as a direct encouragement to them in the construction 
of their fantastic pictures of the invisible world. 

In a word, Gnosticism may be regarded as a collateral 
episode, errant and digressive, yet possibly to some extent 
stimulative of a better and more legitimate development of the 
Pauline dogma. In this latter, Christianity appeared to be 
somewhat of the nature of a temporal and isolated intervention 
in human affairs, not clearly and organically connected with 



486 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the great cosmic system. This limitation of the sphere was 
due, in some degree, to its intrinsic supernaturalistic character ; 
yet, as already hinted, a necessity could not but be felt, even in 
an age in which supernaturalism gave no offence, of finding 
for Christianity a prominent and essential place in a theosophic 
construction of the world-system. A solution of this urgent 
problem was attempted by the Gnostic sects in a direction 
which ran counter to the Christian consciousness, and to the 
fundamental monotheism of Christianity ; whereas the orthodox 
Church, as represented by the writers of the post-Pauline 
epistles, and ultimately by the fourth Evangelist, reacted 
against the Gnostic tendency, and sought and achieved a 
further definition of Pauline Christianity, which, because it was 
more in keeping with the monotheistic principle, has proved 
determinant of all subsequent development of Christian 
theology. 

The epistles which represent this other development are 
those to the Hebrews, the Colossians, and the Ephesians. In 
the Epistle to the Hebrews, which comes first in chronological 
order, it is observable that a style of language is applied to 
Christ which is not to be found in those epistles which are 
undoubtedly Pauline. At the very opening of this epistle, 
Christ, as Son of God, is called the brightness of His glory, 
and the express image of His person ; and in opposition to 
the language of St. Paul in 2 Corinthians, his throne is de- 
clared to be for ever and ever : he is said to have created the 
heavens and the earth, in terms more unhesitating than are to 
be found in St. Paul's writings, while not a hint is given of 
delegation and still less of demission. In referring to the 
Christology of this epistle, Professor O. Pfleiderer, in his recent 
work on Primitive Christianity, maintains that , through the 
medium of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom, and the writings of 
Philo, pre-Christian Hellenism exerted a profound influence 
on the Pauline construction of Christianity, and still more 
on deutero-Paulinism : and it is impossible to believe that the 
many parallelisms of thought and language, which he brings 
forward in support of his position, are accidental and unde- 
signed. But we venture to think that he has misconceived 
and exaggerated the nature and extent of the obligation. He 
goes the length of suggesting that the principles of Christianity 
were for the most part contained in pre-Christian Hellenism, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 487 

and that Christianity added little to the latter, except by sup- 
plying it with a historical basis; therefore, as that historical basis 
now threatens to become the least secure part of the entire 
system, it would thus be made to appear as if the novelty of 
Christianity and the value of its contribution to the religious 
idea were approaching to the vanishing point. Professor 
Pfleiderer has not taken into consideration that the impulse 
to exalt the person of Christ proceeded wholly out of the 
Christian consciousness, and that every side light or specula- 
tion, from whatever source, was welcomed, which could help that 
impulse to an adequate or suitable expression. It has been 
our endeavour to show that religious elements were brought to 
light in the life and teaching of Jesus, of which there is little or 
no trace in Greek or Jewish literature : that the evangelic 
sentiment or consciousness of St. Paul was formed, independently 
of Hellenistic, or for that matter, of prophetic or Pharisaic 
thought, simply by the teaching and death of Jesus acting on 
his own experience under the law. The inception of his dogma 
on the other hand, was owing to the consciousness thus formed, 
placed in the re-admitted light of the current or Pharisaic 
doctrine of his time. Hellenistic ideas, so far as they came in 
at all, could only have come in at a logically later period, not 
to found or to mould his dogma, but only to rationalize or 
buttress his conception, already formed, of the universal in- 
cidence of the atonement. No doubt the deutero-Paulinists 
had recourse to the Hellenistic quarry for modes of expression 
by which to indicate, without trespassing on the monotheistic 
idea, the divine status which the Christian sentiment willed to 
confer on Christ; modes of expression which had been coined 
by the ranging speculation and subtle ingenuity of the Greek 
intellect, but were foreign to the more realistic mind of the 
Jew, as well as to the crude phantasy of oriental peoples. 
There was thus supplied an important but still subordinate 
ministrant contribution to the post-apostolic form of doctrine. 
The comparative denationalization of Judaism under the in- 
fluence of Hellenic thought, of which abundant evidence is 
found in Jewish- Alexandrian literature, never got beyond the 
stage of an academic flight, and was never likely to become 
popular on Jewish soil, or to influence the theology of the 
synagogue. Apart from the fructifying ideas of Christianity, 
pre-Christian Hellenism would have had no better fate than the 



488 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

later Platonism of the succeeding age. But we may admit 
without hesitation, that in this post-apostolic period, the philo- 
sophic thought and language of the west came to the aid of 
Christianity in its conflict with oriental ideas. 

While, as already said, the Gnostic minority sought to exalt 
the conception of Christ, by ranking him with celestial agents 
of the divine will, and by extending his redemptive function to 
the universal order ; the Church, as represented by the deutero- 
Paulinists, especially by the writers of the Epistles to the 
Colossians and Ephesians, sought the same end, by claiming a 
place for him above the rivalry of all such agents, and by 
attributing a wider and more universal significance to his 
person and office. So far from denying the existence of such 
intermediate agents, they speak of them as principalities and 
powers in heavenly places ; and of Christ as raised far above 
them all : as standing on an unapproachable height, and 
having pre-eminence in all things. While the Gnostic teachers 
regarded the pleroma or fulness of the divine nature as repre- 
sented by an infinity of angelic beings, or intermediate spirits, 
who executed the divine purposes, the deutero-Paulinists, on 
the other hand, declare that the pleroma dwelt bodily, that is, 
exclusively or entirely, in the person of Christ (Col. ii. 9) : and 
also that creation and redemption are alike his work. In the 
Gnostic systems, that aeon, of which Christ was the temporal 
representative, might be the highest of the powers which 
mediated between the primal cause and the universe, material 
and spiritual ; but he was still one of them. Whereas, these 
writers represent him as altogether peerless. 

Let it here be observed that we leave it undetermined 
whether these writers had the incipient Gnosticism in view and 
wrote with a polemical interest to counteract its influence. 
The two developments of Pauline doctrine were con- 
temporaneous, so that in all probability they acted and 
reacted on each other, and if chronological precedence is to 
be adjudged to either the one or the other, we must probably 
adjudge it to Gnosticism in its obscure beginnings. According 
to a general law which a survey of ecclesiastical history seems 
to suggest, it is the prevalence or growth of false doctrine 
which induces the conservative Church reluctantly to define its 
position, and certainly it gives force and meaning to many 
expressions in the post-Pauline epistles to suppose that they 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 489 

have an anti-Gnostic reference. At the same time the hyper- 
Pauline definitions in these epistles may have been quite 
spontaneous, and may have arisen independently of any such 
reference out of a felt necessity to satisfy the Christian con- 
sciousness. That section of the Church, represented by the 
post-Pauline writers, may have freely adopted one definition of 
Pauline Christology considered to be orthodox, because in 
keeping with the general tendency of the dogma, while the 
Gnostic sects may have adopted another definition more in 
keeping with inherited Gentile ideas which the general Christian 
consciousness stigmatized as heretical. This view makes the 
two definitions to have been originally independent. But 
which of the two views we may prefer is of little consequence. 
And even chronological data, if they could be determined, 
would go but a little way in settling this question, inasmuch as 
in the great developments of human thought the chronological 
sequence is not in all cases strictly concurrent with the logical 
sequence. 

So far as can now be judged there was, in the post-apostolic 
period, a space in which conflicting developments of Pauline 
theology circulated freely in the Church side by side in a 
confused ferment. This state of things lasted until the general 
Christian consciousness was able to discriminate betwixt the 
various elements according as they did or did not satisfy its 
own genius, and until it had the courage to define the differ- 
ence as that of heresy and orthodoxy. That was the critical 
period in which the dogma, from being a practical system of 
thought as it was in the hands of Paul, sought to become a 
speculative system and to determine its relation to the current 
thought of the age. Something of the same kind has happened, 
though on a less cardinal scale, in all the great doctrinal con- 
flicts of subsequent ages, and confirms that view of the post- 
apostolic period which may be gathered from the few notes of 
it which have come down to us. For every new definition of 
dogma has been preceded by a period in which the opinion, 
which was ultimately decreed to be heretical, was able to 
maintain its ground and to contend on equal terms with that 
which ultimately prevailed as orthodox. 

In the deutero-Pauline epistles, to which we have chiefly 
referred, there is no polemic overtly and obviously directed 
against Gnosticism as a recognized heresy. It may be that the 



490 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

orthodox party, as represented by the writers of these epistles, 
were seeking to overcome or to absorb the Gnostic movement 
into itself by means of compromise or concession or forbearing 
polemic, and so to avoid a breach in the Church : but if so, the 
veiled polemical conciliatory tone is laid aside in the pastoral 
epistles which were ascribed to St. Paul and written in his 
name. These epistles direct a polemic against various heretical 
tendencies (some of which we have left unnoticed) which were 
combined in Gnosticism. They abound with warnings against 
giving heed to fables and endless genealogies and vain 
babblings and oppositions of science (y vow is) falsely so-called, 
and against doctrines of devils (Saijuoviwv). And if these 
allusions are not even more pointed and direct, the reason may 
be, that these epistles being published under the name of St. 
Paul while Gnosticism was a phenomenon of post-Pauline date, 
it was expedient that the anti-Gnostic tendency should not be 
too conspicuous lest the anachronism should be too evident 
and their apostolic authorship challenged from the first. It 
may be remarked, however, that the anti-Gnostic tendency is 
more pronounced and undisguised in the First Epistle of St. 
John, Second Peter, and Jude, the main difference between 
these epistles being that in some the ethical aspect, in others 
the Christological aspect of Gnosticism is more kept in view. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 



It is evident now that the orthodox position in all these 
epistles would be satisfactory in the highest degree to all in 
whom the Christian consciousness was fully developed, but it is 
as evident that to those who were still under the influence of 
the Gentile ideas in which they had been educated, and which 
still prevailed in the society around them, this position would 
be far less satisfactory and conclusive, just because it might be 
regarded by them as a merely polemical anti-Gnostic position 
ingeniously occupied by their adversaries, and on that very 
account carrying with it very little weight and authority. In 
fact it had this very unsatisfactory and assailable feature, 
that it rested on mere assertion. On the one hand the 
Gnostic asserted that between God and the cosmos there 
existed innumerable hosts of spiritual beings of a nature 
akin to God. The Paulinists met this assertion by the 
counter-assertion that Christ the Redeemer was the sole 
Mediator, not in the moral sense only, but in the metaphysical as 
well, and therefore possessed of an undivided claim to human 
homage. Of these positions the one was, or seemed to be, as 
defensible, speculatively, as the other, and room remained for 
a controversy which as yet there was no means of settling. 
For its settlement there was needed some judge or arbiter, to 
whose verdict both parties should bow. A great historian says 
that as each side, by the use of the allegorical interpretation of 
the Old Testament, could claim its support, there was only one 
opinion against another, so that the dispute between Paulinist 
and Gnostic could only be decided by some principle standing- 
above Scripture. And this principle he finds in the tradition 



492 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

which was fixed by the doctrine received in Churches which 
had been visited by apostles. It was, he says, in the conflict 
with Gnosticism that tradition was first placed in that relation 
to Scripture, which it has ever since maintained in the doctrinal 
system of the Catholic Church ; and he points out that the 
authority of tradition was greatly promoted and established 
by the rise of the episcopate, which was due to several causes, 
and among others to the felt need of a counterpoise to the cen- 
trifugal tendencies of speculative Gnostic thought. 

These views of Dr. Baur must, we think, approve them- 
selves at once to everyone who is at all acquainted with the 
historical situation, indistinct as it is, of the Church of the 
second century. And we deem it unnecessary to say any- 
thing by way of illustration. The three ideas of tradition, 
the episcopate, and the Catholic Church, form together an 
organic unity, and were mutually helpful to each other. 
But it is our conviction that even the appeal to tradition, 
backed by the power of the rising episcopate, would not 
have succeeded in realizing the idea of the Catholic Church, 
or in averting the crisis and deadlock in the development 
of Christian doctrine of which we have just spoken, had it 
not been for the great achievement of the fourth Evangelist 
in setting forth a Christological view which appealed to 
Gnostics and to Paulinists alike — to Paulinists, because it 
seemed to exalt the Christ to the highest conceivable and 
unapproachable pinnacle of glory; to Gnostics, because to 
the speculative mind it seemed to be a Gnosis in which 
every other was swallowed up ; and finally, to both alike, 
because it was represented as receiving the sanction of Christ 
himself, whose authority could be disowned by neither. 

The Gnostic movement was in an acute stage for many 
decades, and it was probably during this period that the fourth 
Gospel made its appearance. Beyond this general statement 
or surmise, its chronological relation to that movement is, 
for our purpose, of comparatively little moment ; for, as we have 
already said, in the great developments of human thought the 
chronological is not always coincident with the logical sequence, 
and it is this latter which most concerns us here. The Logos- 
idea or, let us say, the prologue of the fourth Gospel, is of the 
nature of a speculative or metaphysical definition of the 
orthodox Christological standpoint, and on the principle, 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 493 

guaranteed by the general course of Church history, that all 
such definition is thrust upon the Church by the prevalence or 
growth of heretical speculation, we hold that the Gnostic 
heresy was the logical antecedent of the fourth Gospel. 

To open up the question to which we have thus been led, 
we remark that practically there are only two theories as to the 
date and authorship of the fourth Gospel. (1) The first of 
these is, that this Gospel is what it professes to be — a strictly 
historical narrative of events in the life of Jesus, of which St. 
John the apostle was witness ; composed or dictated by him 
towards the very end of his life, about the conclusion of the 
first century or the very beginning of the second century. (2) 
The other theory is that it is the work of some Christian, 
almost certainly a Jew, who thought in Hebrew while he wrote 
in Greek ; a man unknown to fame, but of a boldly creative 
genius, who composed his book some time between the second 
and the fourth decade of the second century or even later ; a 
book by no means historical, but designed to illustrate in his- 
torical form the idea that the Christ, the Messiah of the Jews, 
was in reality a manifestation veiled in flesh of the Being who 
was known in Greek philosophy, or in Jewish theosophy, as the 
Logos, the living, hypostatic word or reason of God. The 
variants of these two theories may here be left out of con- 
sideration. 

Much learned ingenuity has been expended by Bishop 
Lightfoot and other orthodox apologists in tracing the internal 
evidence of the authenticity of the Gospel. That there should 
be many marks of authenticity in such a book was only what 
was to be expected ; though it can hardly be denied that at a 
few crucial points no conclusive settlement has been arrived at. 
But, not to enter into details, the weak feature of the orthodox- 
argument is, that whatever strength it has is within the narrow 
area of mere scholarship. It leaves out of consideration all 
such criticism as has been suggested by the scientific and 
speculative reasoning of modern times. For instance, it takes 
no account of the possibility that all such marks of authenticity, 
as may be pointed out, may conceivably be traceable to some 
Christian of the second century, who, with wide intelligence and 
high power of imagination, had also an urgent motive to make 
use of these in the composition of a new Gospel. Might not 
such a motive be supplied by the Church's need of an identi- 



494 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

fication of the Christ with the Supreme Being, more complete 
than can be gathered from the synoptic Gospels or the epistles 
of St. Paul, and by means of which the tendency towards 
Gnosticism might be checked? Might not some Christian who 
perceived the need, and saw that the current Logos-idea was 
what was needed in the emergency, be the author of the Gos- 
pel? Might not the imaginative insight of such an individual 
enable him to think himself back into the scenes amid which 
Jesus lived, and give to him a fine feeling for the situation 
created in Judea by the appearance within its borders of one 
whom he regarded as at once the Messiah and the Logos? By 
his power of realistic presentation might he not also be able, 
after the manner of other great writers, to make use of such 
knowledge as he had of the topography of Palestine — of the 
localities in and about Jerusalem, and of the state of the various 
parties in the population, to give framing, circumstance, and 
variety to the really few and monotonous but truly grand ideas 
which he wished to impress upon his readers. 

Taking this possibility into consideration, we are entitled to 
say that, even if we admit to a large extent the details of the 
internal evidence which have been summed up by apologetic 
theologians, nothing very positive is established in favour of the 
Johannine authorship of the Gospel. But another weakness of 
their argument is, that they uniformly keep out of sight one 
great improbability which stands on the very threshold of their 
theory. That theory requires that St. John should be regarded 
as having written his Gospel about the very end of the first 
century, near the close of his long life. This date is assigned 
to it by the tradition of the early Church, and all but univer- 
sally admitted by modern apologists. So satisfied with this 
date is Bishop Lightfoot, that it is given by him as the reason 
why the uncanonical epistles of Barnabas and Clemens Romanus, 
which belong, at the earliest, to the last quarter of the first 
century, exhibit no traces of the influence of the Gospel. He 
says that no such traces can be expected seeing these epistles 
were written before the fourth Gospel ; thus implying for one 
thing that this Gospel is the only source from which the view 
of evangelic history peculiar to it could be derived ; or, in 
effect, that St. John alone of the personal followers of Jesus 
enjoyed, or at least understood, appreciated, and treasured up 
those intimate confidences and disclosures on the part of Jesus, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 495 

of which the rest of the Church knew nothing ; that the 
Evangelist being, as he himself relates, the beloved disciple, 
who leaned on the bosom of Jesus, he was the sole depositary 
of those most solemn and mysterious communications which he- 
reports. We say the " sole depositary," because, had the 
synoptists, or St. Paul, or the writer of the Hebrews, or 
Barnabas, or Clemens, known anything of these, their influence 
could not possibly have failed to betray itself in their writings, 
which, by common consent, it does not. 

Now, how is it possible to conceive that, for sixty years 
or more, the apostle could have kept back those wonderful 
discourses, or refrained from divulging them to the Church 
at large ; that he could have kept from saying to himself, 
like St. Paul, " Woe is me, if I preach not this gospel," or 
not been haunted by the dread of neglecting the most sacred 
duty of preserving those strange utterances to the Church? 
The early legend, that the design of imparting these remini- 
scences to the Church did not originate with himself, but with 
certain elders at Ephesus, who constrained him by their solicita- 
tions to place his reminiscences on record, only heightens the 
inexplicable nature of his conduct. It will not do to say, as 
has been said, that the apostle may have deferred the writing 
of his Gospel because the Church was not prepared to receive 
its high doctrine ; for he represents the discourses of Jesus, 
which are the distinctive feature of his Gospel, as having been 
spoken to mixed untutored multitudes. We confess that these 
considerations alone, though they seem never to have startled 
the easy faith of the Church of the second century, are yet so 
obvious to us as to be sufficient to induce us to have recourse 
to the other theory of the authorship, viz., that some unknown 
Christian, some mighty mind in the second century, was the 
author of this great work of theological invention. 

Turning now to the external evidence, we remark, that at 
the first and most critical period the tradition of the Johannine 
authorship rests mainly, or rather wholly, on the few dubious 
links which connect Irenaeus, Papias, and Justin Martyr with 
the apostle ; and that, against the consideration just advanced, 
that evidence is of very little weight. We are thus led to 
abandon the Johannine origin of the Gospel, or, which is the 
same thing, to regard it as a work of the second century, and 
it then becomes of comparatively little or no consequence to 



49^ THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

what decade of that century it is assigned. On general grounds, 
however, we should prefer to place it late, rather than early, 
in the century. For it may be confidently asserted that what- 
ever parallelisms and correspondences to the Gospel in thought 
and modes of expression may be visible in writings believed to 
belong to an early period of the century, these coincidences 
are isolated, in the sense that they have no organic connection 
with the rest of the writings in which they occur, and that the 
writers are only feebly, if at all, imbued with the Lehrbegriff 
of the Gospel — that is to say, with its distinctive form of 
doctrine — a fact which seems to show that the writers have no 
familiar, or even general, acquaintance with the Gospel itself. 
And if it yet be asked how then these coincidences can be 
accounted for, the answer is, either that the Gospel, though not 
widely known or accepted as of equal authority with the other 
three, was yet already in existence, and was beginning to work 
itself into the thought and language of the Church ; or that 
certain modes of expression and of doctrinal conception, of a 
sacramentarian leaning, which were coming independently into 
currency, were gathered up by the author, and woven into a 
piece with his Gospel. In our opinion, moreover, the latter 
alternative is the more likely explanation of the two, in support 
of which opinion we content ourselves with the following quota- 
tion from Mr Lecky's History of the Eighteenth Century, iv., 444 : 
" Like all books which mark an epoch in the human intellect, 
the treatise of Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) was in a 
great measure representative : systematizing, elaborating, and 
harmonizing modes of political thinking, which had been gather- 
ing strength in the community." In this sense, we believe the 
fourth Gospel to have been "representative," doing the same thing 
for the religious thought of the second century as the Wealth 
of Nations did for the political thought of the eighteenth. 

Our position then is, that the Logos idea, having dropped as 
a living seed into the mind of that master spirit, where it shot 
forth into a speculative or idealistic view of Christianity, would 
tend, according to a principle already stated, to clothe itself in 
a concrete realistic form, and finally would allow no rest to 
the imagination of the great but obscure artist till the pano- 
rama of the life of Jesus, which, conform to that idea, had risen 
up before his mind's eye, had transferred itself to the historical 
canvas, as we find it in the fourth Gospel. 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 49/ 

Such, in brief, is our solution of the difficulty as to the 
authorship of this Gospel. But we do not ask our readers 
to be satisfied with these summary and somewhat abstract 
considerations. We propose to call in other considerations 
by which to incline the balance still more in favour of the 
theory which we espouse. It may truly be said that that 
theory bristles with difficulties. Of these the first is, that any 
man of such transcendent ability as we suppose the author to 
have been, should have veiled his personality or escaped the 
notice of his contemporaries 5(2) there is the difficulty of con- 
ceiving the state of mind which would induce him to frame an 
imaginary narrative of the life of one whom he believed to be 
divine, and to have offered it as a genuine record ; (3) that this 
work should have got so readily into credit and circulation as 
the work of the apostle St. John — all which points we shall, 
as they meet us, have to take up. 

Before proceeding further with the consideration of this 
gospel we encounter the fact (to us strange) that many liberal 
theologians, including Schleiermacher and his followers, regard 
it as the greatest and most historical of the four, and as con- 
taining a comparatively genuine record at least of many of the 
sayings and discourses of Jesus. The preference thus given to 
the fourth Gospel may, we believe, be accounted for in two 
ways — first, by the fact that it carries idealization to a higher 
summit ; and secondly, by the circumstance that though 
it contains supernatural realistic elements like the others, it 
carries these into the region of metaphysical, theosophical 
thought, which has a strong attraction to many minds, as 
throwing a softening veil over the outlines of the definite 
dogma. Among the writers in this country who have 
adopted the same attitude towards the fourth Gospel may 
be reckoned Mr. M. Arnold, who seeks to justify the 
preference over the synoptics which he gives to it by the 
observation that the doctrines and discourses of Jesus, as there 
reported, " cannot in the main be the writer's because they arc 
clearly out of his reach," and must therefore be presumed to be 
the actual and authentic sayings of Jesus. We confess that we 
see little or no reason for such an observation, but much to the 
contrary, and that Mr. Arnold's minute but ingenious criticism 
(upon which we do not enter), goes but a little way to confirm 
his view. There is a strong presumption that one and the 

2 1 



49^ THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

same person wrote both the First Epistle of St. John and the 
Gospel. Now, in the former the writer shows himself to be 
quite at home in that same region of thought in which the 
discourses of Jesus range in the latter. And it is apparent 
that a writer who could invent, or even select, the other 
materials of his Gospel, which are so much in keeping with the 
discourses to which they form the frame, and reduce all into a 
confessedly epic unity, gives no uncertain proof that the dis- 
courses were quite within his reach, and that he perfectly 
understood their import. Were we indeed to suppose that the 
writer was one of the first disciples, according to the repre- 
sentation given of them in the synoptic Gospels, we might well 
admit that these discourses were beyond his reach ; but we 
cannot so well admit or affirm this if we suppose him to have 
been a disciple of a later generation, who may have been 
acquainted with the development of the dogma in its various 
stages — Jewish-Christian, Pauline, and post-apostolic — leading 
up step by step, as we have seen, to the application of the 
Logos-idea to Jesus. We do not know indeed who the writer 
was ; we know of no man in the second century who could by 
any possibility have been the author of the book ; but the fact 
that such a man as Jesus could arise in his time, affords a 
presumption that another, though less mighty, genius might 
arise at a later time, who could perceive to what the dogma 
tended, viz., to the Logos-idea and all that it involved as 
applied to Jesus. The view here indicated as to the authorship 
of the book will be confirmed in the sequel. 

The question as to the date of the fourth Gospel is still, and 
may long continue to be, sub judice ; but, apart altogether from 
the presumption created by anything which has yet been 
advanced, we agree with those critics who have arrived at the 
conclusion that this Gospel was composed about the time, or 
not much before the time, at which it comes within the direct 
light of history. A date is thus assigned to it which har- 
monizes well enough with a period at which the Gnostic 
movement had well begun, and falls in with our view as to its 
literary antecedents. Without entering fully into the grounds 
of this conclusion we may here state briefly that down to the 
time of Justin Martyr, inclusive of that father's literary 
activity (supposed to extend from 140 A.D. to 160 A.D.), no 
direct mention is ever made of the fourth Gospel, and that the 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 499 

constructive proofs of its earlier existence, which have been 
collected by apologists from the writings of Clement, Barnabas, 
Hermas, and Justin himself, are far from demonstrative. Such 
parallelisms with its terminology and modes of thought as do 
occur in these writings, even if they warranted a belief in its 
prior existence, are yet of such a nature as to be far from 
warranting the conclusion that it was regarded by the writers 
as a work of the same age and authority as the synoptic 
Gospels. But, in truth, these parallelisms leave the question as 
to its priority more than doubtful. Holzmann's verdict is — 
" Nicht Johannes wird citirt, aber Johanneisches ist im Anzug 
begriffen." That is to say, that in all non-canonical writings 
down to those of Justin, and his included, such parallelisms as 
do occur are not quotations, whether free or verbal, from the 
fourth Gospel, but only so many proofs that its Christology 
and general style of thought and expression were in process of 
growth. To ideas which, as may be seen in the Paulinistic 
epistles and in early non-canonical writings, were struggling 
ineffectually for utterance in the Church, the fourth Evangelist 
did but give adequate expression. The parallelisms alluded to 
were but germs and anticipations of his maturer thought. And 
this conjecture of Holzmann falls in with and is strikingly con- 
firmed by the general observation just quoted from Mr. Lecky. 

One very decisive fact corroborative of the late date of the 
fourth Gospel may here be given. Writing some time after 
140 A.D., Justin Martyr gives an incidental description of the 
style of discourse employed by Jesus, which is almost of itself 
sufficient to exclude the possibility of his having regarded that 
Gospel as of the same age or authority with the synoptic Gospels. 
His words are : " fipayels Se kcl\ g-vvtojulol irap ovtov Xoyot 
yzyovaviv." The language of Jesus was brief and concise — a 
description strikingly appropriate to the discourse of Jesus as 
reported in the synoptic Gospels; but so glaringly inappropriate 
to the diffuse style of his discourse in the fourth Gospel that 
it can be accounted for only by supposing either that Justin was 
ignorant of the existence of the latter, or that he did not 
accept of it as an authority of equal rank or of equal historical 
value with the others. 

But there is a still more remarkable and unaccountable 
difference between the discourses of Jesus in the fourth Gospel 
and those in the synoptics. While in the latter Jesus says 



500 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

comparatively little concerning himself, his whole doctrine in 
the fourth Gospel is of a self-referent, self-revealing character, 
and on that very account more notable, more memorable, more 
likely to arrest attention and to excite surprise, than the im- 
personal, simply ethical and spiritual teaching of which the 
synoptic Gospels contain the record. Had this self-reference, 
this identification of himself with the truth of God, been as 
pervading and conspicuous a feature of his teaching as the 
fourth Evangelist would have us believe, it would have fallen 
with such startling effect on the ears of his followers as never 
to be overlooked or forgotten, and as in fact to have engrossed 
their attention, and to have left them in not a moment's doubt 
as to the nature of his claims. And even if we were to regard 
the composition of all four Gospels as nearly contemporaneous, 
we should have to explain how it was, by what curious selec- 
tion, or rather by what capricious obliviousness, the testimonies 
of Jesus to himself dropped out of the synoptic tradition. On 
the supposition of the " substantial historicity" of the fourth 
Gospel, the formation of a tradition so blind as the synoptic is 
to the grander aspects of the life and teaching of Jesus, so 
perversely one-sided and unappreciative, is incomprehensible. 
What interest could there be, what end could be served, in 
abstracting or sifting from his doctrine an element so singularly 
fitted as its self-reference is, either to challenge opposition or to 
excite surprise, but in either case to fix attention upon itself as 
the most novel and characteristic feature of his doctrine. Is it 
conceivable that this self-referent aspect of his teaching, if 
really belonging to it, could ever have dropped from the 
memory of the disciples who reported it ? Is it credible that 
this most palpable, most prominent, most substantive element 
should have escaped the notice of all but a bosom disciple ? 
The superior insight and sympathy with which that disciple is 
credited by himself and by theologians were not at all necessary 
to appreciate this aspect of his teaching. And if the fourth 
Gospel contains a true report of his teaching, this feature of it 
must have been so palpable as to rivet the attention of the 
most obtuse, as well as the most unfriendly of his hearers. We 
confess that the impossibility of explaining this curiously 
anomalous circumstance would compel us, in the absence of all 
other reasons, to regard the synoptic tradition of the teaching 
of Jesus as the more authentic. In this as in many other 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 50 I 

respects there is such a discrepancy between the synoptic and 
the Johannine records, as to make it impossible for us to 
combine into " one stereoscopic image " the two pictures of 
Jesus which they present to us. 

By the period, of which, so far as this question is concerned, 
Justin is the representative, Christianity had long been in living 
contact with the speculative thought of the age, and especially 
with that of Hellenism. Evidences of this fact reach as far 
back as the epistles of St. Paul, and since these had been 
written there had been a growing disposition in the orthodox- 
section of the Church to connect its doctrines more and more 
closely with current speculation ; to make use of language and 
ideas which had resulted from the combination in Hellenistic 
literature of Greek and Jewish modes of thought. This 
tendency was partly owing, no doubt, to the pressure put upon 
the Church by the spread of Gnosticism, or by the necessity of 
providing a counterpoise to heretical doctrines, which were of 
Eastern character and origin. The proof of what we say is to 
be seen in the deutero-Pauline epistles. But the further and 
most palpable proof and instance of it is to be found in the 
incorporation into the Pauline dogma of the Logos-idea of 
Philonism. It is highly probable that the applicability of this 
idea to the person of Christ, and its manifest importance for 
the settlement of the Gnostic controversy, may have begun to 
dawn upon various circles of the Church, whether at Alexandria 
or in Asia Minor, and to affect their doctrinal phraseology. Its 
Christological importance may have been perceived by the 
philosophic Justin and by the fourth Evangelist independently, 
and may have created for itself a terminology common to both. 
It is noteworthy, however, that the pregnant and mystical depth 
of the idea remained strange to the philosopher. At the most, 
Justin may have had a presentiment of the possible value of 
the idea in a doctrinal point of view, and made use of the ex- 
pression ; whereas, in the hands of the Evangelist, it is used to 
effect a complete metamorphosis of the whole tradition and 
doctrine of the Church. It is thus that ideas and even modes 
of expression pass through a prophetic or preparatory stage 
before their final form and full significance are discovered. 

To many speculative minds in that and in preceding ages. 
there had seemed to be grounds, inherent in the divine nature 
itself and in the relation subsisting between the finite and the 



502 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Infinite, for believing in the existence of an intermediate agent, 
raised far above and out of the rank of all creaturely ministers 
of the divine will, however exalted — another self of God, 
between whom and the great First Cause there was only an 
economic difference ; an object, therefore, of worship and of 
superlative veneration, not to men only, but to all " the angels 
of God." By both Greeks and Hellenists this Being had been 
called the Logos, the word or reason of God. On the hypo- 
thesis now that there was such a Being, it was hardly possible 
that even Gnostics, in whom survived a vestige of the Christian 
consciousness, could identify him with any other personality 
than that of Christ, or could fail to rebel against assigning such 
a peerless and unapproachable dignity in the spiritual world to 
any other claimant. The Christian consciousness again, as 
developed among Paulinists, had all along been struggling, as 
we have seen, towards some such conception of the Redeemer, 
and could rest in nothing short of it: and this very drift of that 
consciousness must have formed in itself an anticipation and 
guarantee for the truth of the speculative idea, over and above 
that which was inherent in it. The application of this idea to 
the person of Christ was all that was needed to arrest the 
tendency within the Church to revert to polytheistic worship; 
enough to consign to the limbo of' thought all those purely 
imaginary ranks of angelic beings with which the heretical sects 
were, in the height of their caprice, peopling the invisible world ; 
to stop the dispersion of the religious feelings ; to drive off and 
expel all alien and incompatible gnosis ; to guide the speculative 
spirit into a safe channel, and to prevent it from wandering into 
fields which lay outside the Christian sphere. 

We must pause here however by the way, to admit that this 
observation as to the power of the Logos-idea to arrest the 
polytheistic tendency in the (Gentile) Church needs to be 
qualified. For that tendency was all but incurable. The idea 
sufficed, indeed, to counteract the tendency to recruit the 
heavenly hierarchy with dim, semi-divine shapes from outside 
the Christian system, with forms of existence which reflected 
nothing of the evangelic spirit ; but the polytheizing tendency 
after a pause in its action recovered itself as from a kind of 
backwater in more guarded and colourable form, in the 
Mariolatry and saint worship of the Church. Such at least is 
our reading of ecclesiastical history in its general features. 









THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 503 

Newman, indeed, says that the cults of the Virgin and the 
saints are totally different in principle from religious worship. 
But it needs a mind very much predisposed, to accept the 
apology of Newman and other controversialists for the 
idolatrous practices of Catholic countries. The moment the 
Church, by recognizing the divinity of Christ, abandoned the 
position of monotheism pure and simple, it placed itself on 
an inclined plane, or on what a popular preacher has called 
the " down grade " ; and that it should descend sooner or later 
to the worship of the Virgin and the saints was inevitable. 
Nothing but the evangelic doctrine in its purity and freshness 
— -the living conception of God as our Heavenly Father — could 
deliver the soul of man from the spirit of fear and diffidence 
before the Unseen Power, so as to enable it to dispense with 
the Logos-idea, and consequently with all inferior and sub- 
ordinate agents of the divine will. The monotheistic doctrine, 
in its physical or non-moral aspect, is to this day and always 
has been the strength of Mahometanism. In the moral and 
humane aspect of it, as presented by Jesus, it has yet to prove 
the strength of Christianity by the overthrow of all competing 
cults and of superstition in every shape. 

It was reserved for one who was deeply penetrated by the 
spirit of Christianity, and had a clear perception of the goal of 
its dogmatic development, to single out with unerring tact from 
all the theosophic ideas then afloat that one which, overlooked 
by the Gnostic sects, and even by the Paulinistic writers, could 
by its application to Christ confer a unique character upon his 
person and his redemptive functions, and could best express 
the dogmatic position which Christian experience and Christian 
sentiment were impelled from within to assign to him. By an 
act of supreme genius the fourth Evangelist perceived that the 
Pauline dogma, being merely reflective of religious experience 
and therefore indefinite, did not present a sufficient barrier 
against heretical speculation, and that the dogmatic position was 
insecure so long as it could only be negatively maintained 
by anti-Gnostic assertions which lay quite beyond the range of 
experience. We conceive of him as a man who was impelled, 
either by native and irrepressible tendency, or by the felt 
necessity of meeting the Gnostic sects on their own ground 
and combating them with their own weapons, to supply a 
super-experiential or speculative basis or presupposition for the 



S04 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

dogma. He recognized that the great want of the time — the 
postulate of the Christian consciousness — was a higher gnosis 
which might act as a counter-attraction to the gnosis of the 
heretical sects, and this he found in the application to the 
person of Christ of the Logos-idea which was widely current as 
an element of religious thought, popular and philosophic, in 
that and the preceding ages. 

Whoever he was, whether of Jewish or of Gentile extraction, 
the fourth Evangelist was a man of the deepest spiritual 
insight, and withal a master of dialectic like St. Paul; not like 
that Apostle, however, of a predominantly logical and practical 
turn of mind, but rather of a contemplative and mystical order. 
St. Paul, as we have seen, exercised his dialectic solely in 
tracing his own religious experience to a supernatural origin 
and in building up a Christological and soteriological system 
by means of the naive and empirical theory of divine action 
common to that age, and of categories which were specifically 
Jewish. He overlooked and left out of sight, or, to speak more 
correctly, he was unaware of the natural, non-magical, or 
psychological explanation of the great crisis of his life. His 
dogma was nothing but the construction or interpretation of 
his individual experience on the basis of his belief in the super- 
natural, and in the traditional Jewish theology ; and being on 
that account not a pure reflection of the facts, but only 
relatively, figuratively, or symbolically true, in the way at most 
of a working theory or hypothesis, it could not possibly satisfy 
the speculative thought which inevitably began to play around 
it. The Gnostic heresy was the product of this play of 
speculative thought, and the prevalence of this heresy was the 
main historical and environing condition which, while it might 
seem to Paulinists to necessitate an appeal to tradition, and a 
consolidation of the power of the episcopate, also called forth 
to the rescue the genius of the fourth Evangelist. The 
reactionary movement towards Judaism which engaged the 
polemic of St. Paul does not come much, if at all, into con- 
sideration here. For it is obvious, that for the fourth 
Evangelist himself, and probably for the Church at large, the 
conquest of that tendency was already to a great extent an 
accomplished fact. But we shall not fully understand the 
polemical relations and the environing conditions of the fourth 
Gospel unless we take into account the probability, or rather 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 505 

the certainty, that, in concurrence with the Gnostic heresy, 
Jewish Christianity in a new form still survived to cause 
anxiety to the Church. 

The period with which we are here dealing is included in 
the interval between 70 A.D. and 140 A.D., which is acknow- 
ledged on all hands to be the most obscure in all the history of 
the Church. The historical data are few, and often seemingly 
conflicting ; so that, by the help of conjecture, various schools 
of theology have been able to frame such a view of this period 
as may best fit in with their general systems. We do not 
profess to dispense with this same instrument of reasoning in 
dealing with this period, and as little do we profess a confidence 
greater than we feel in the view which we have adopted. The 
conjectural construction of this period, which we adopt, derives 
its probability for us from its seeming to harmonize with our 
general views. What we say is, that during the period referred 
to, the opposition of Jewish sentiment, whether without or 
within the Church, to the evangelic and universalistic character 
of the new religion had died down, or, at least, had been 
silenced, in consequence, partly, of the destruction of Jerusalem, 
partly of the powerful dialectic with which St. Paul com- 
bated it on grounds which it was unable to dispute, and 
partly of the imposing spectacle of the rapid Christianization 
of the Gentiles, by which Jewish exclusiveness was put out of 
countenance. As far as mere logic was concerned, the right 
might be on the side of the Jewish Christians. But the 
reasoning of the Apostle was reinforced by the moral 
grandeur of that spectacle, and by the enthusiastic con- 
viction with which he assailed their defensive and conservative 
position. Owing to these causes, the original phase of 
Jewish opposition was overcome ; Jewish legalism was 
seen to be a weapon which had lost its power to 
stay the progress of the new religion, and was practically 
discredited. But, while this was taking place, the opposi- 
tion gradually entered upon a new phase. Jewish, or, let 
us say, monotheistic, sentiment took alarm, and was once 
more quickened into life by the advanced and still advancing 
Christology of the Church. In the Pauline age the practical 
and theoretic difference between the Jewish and the Gentile 
communities lay entirely in the soteriological province. In 
his four great epistles, St. Paul makes no reference to any 



506 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

difference in the Christological field. The explanation of 
which fact is that, during his lifetime, the Christological 
dogma was fluid, vague, and indefinite, and admitted of being 
construed even by zealous monotheists as not extending 
beyond what might be applied to Christ as Messiah. 
But as it advanced beyond this point, and became more 
pronounced and more determinate, the feeling arose that 
the Christological doctrine had become inconsistent with 
the maintenance of the monotheistic principle, and Jewish 
susceptibilities took alarm. There is sufficient evidence of 
the strength of this feeling in the controversial writings of 
Justin, and in the rabbinical literature of the same age. It 
seemed as if the monotheistic principle, of which the Jews 
regarded themselves as the guardians, and of which the 
preaching of the gospel had awakened a belief among the 
Gentiles, was infringed by the unique and transcendent 
position in the spiritual world which was assigned to the 
Christ. Here was a point round which a conflict between 
Jewish and Christian sentiment could not but arise. The 
indications of this conflict, which occur in non-canonical 
literature, may, indeed, as we have just said, be sufficient, 
but it is in the fourth Gospel we perceive the clearest 
proof of its existence. The controversy which that Gospel 
represents Jesus as carrying on with his Jewish opponents 
could not possibly have arisen in his lifetime. There was 
then no question as to his making himself equal with God, 
for the synoptists make it plain that he only claims to be 
the Messiah, and his claim in that character to be the Son 
of God, if it was made by him, did not encroach upon 
the divine prerogative. Whatever the rank or majesty 
expressed by this title, it was delegated or conferred upon him 
by God. The title merely indicated the intimate relationship 
which subsisted between God and the Messiah. But by the 
time we now speak of, Jesus had been exalted by the reverence 
of his followers to a higher position than belonged to him as 
Messiah ; terms were applied and attributes ascribed to him, 
which seemed to leave no interval between him and the 
supreme God. Everything which men were wont to say of the 
latter was freely predicated of him. Hence the new phase of 
Jewish opposition ; and it was to meet this new phase that the 
fourth Evangelist represents Jesus and his opponents as fore- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. S°7 

stalling the controversy of the later time. " This controversy," 
as remarked by Weizsacker, " is of quite a different character 
from that recorded in the synoptic Gospels ; the character 
which it assumed among the epigoni or men of a later 
generation." 

In the report of this controversy, therefore, we recognize not 
a fanciful, unhistorical invention, but a passage of early Church 
history, carried back by the Evangelist into gospel history. 
Viewed in connection with the earlier or gospel period, the 
controversy was not practical, or called for by the time, but 
one which may be characterized as academic, or a controversy 
of the school. It assumes a practical character only when 
viewed in connection with the state of parties in the second 
century, by which time the dogma had raised Jesus far above 
the Messianic level, and the question was no longer as formerly, 
whether Jesus was or was not the Messiah, but whether there 
was not an aspect of his nature still higher than the Messianic. 
This question Jesus himself is made to settle in favour of the 
dominant party in the Church, but without detriment to the 
monotheistic doctrine, by speaking of himself as one with God; 
one, that is, in the same sense as the Logos ; as the impersona- 
tion of the divine energy, the sole channel of the communication 
of light and life to the race whose nature he had assumed. To 
this extent the fourth Gospel is a sort of Apokalypse in which 
Jesus as another Daniel is represented as settling a controversy, 
which could only be waged in another age, and amid circum- 
stances which had not arisen in his day. 

But this account does not cover the whole polemic position 
of the Evangelist. By one and the same apokalyptic pre- 
sentation he sought, not only to conciliate the monotheistic 
sentiment, but also to cut the nerve of Gnostic speculation. 
The Jewish controversy, in its later phase, was for him of 
subordinate consequence, inasmuch as the victory of the 
Church over Judaistic sentiment was already assured, whereas 
the Gnostic movement was in that age a thing of perilous 
and living moment; and we are inclined to believe that the 
Evangelist fully recognized this distinction, and under the veil 
of a controversy with the later phase of Judaism, in reality 
carried on an anti-Gnostic polemic : for it was necessary that in 
a version of gospel history he should conduct this polemic 
indirectly and unostensibly, as dealing with a phase of opinion 



508 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

which was of more recent origin. But without pressing this 
view we may regard the fourth Gospel in its controversial 
character as having been meant as a defence of the divine 
prerogative of Christ against invasion from the monotheistic 
side on the one hand, and from the Gnostic or polytheizing side 
on the other. 

The Gnostic heresy was in full swing, and we conceive of the 
Evangelist as feeling himself prompted to solve the Gnostic 
problem, i.e., to determine the position of Christ in the scale of 
universal being, not in the Gnostic way of co-ordinating him with 
other spiritual beings, and of thereby " derogating from his 
dignity," but in the way of adhering to the orthodox or Paulin- 
istic line of development, whose guiding principle was to elevate 
the nature and function of Christ to the utmost, to raise him to 
a dignity nothing short of divine, and so to represent him as an 
object of absolute veneration. The means of accomplishing 
this, and of stamping out once for all the reaction towards 
polytheism, and, in general, of bringing to a pause the 
" dangerous questioning of the systematizing intellect," the 
Evangelist found, as already said, in the application to Christ 
of the Logos-idea. By this idea the Evangelist raised him 
clear above all imaginable ranks of mere creaturely ministers, 
however exalted, of the divine will : yet, without encroaching 
upon the monotheistic principle, invested him with functions 
universal and cosmical, including that of being the light and 
life of men, the source and ground of the grand moral and 
spiritual revolution which had attended the preaching of the 
gospel. 

The mental attitude towards the Christ, which prevailed 
among the early Christians, was one of worship, of intense 
devotion, and of utter self-surrender, and as the monotheistic 
idea, in its purity, was intolerant of such absolute homage 
except towards God, the Church had no alternative but sooner 
or later to exalt Christ to the Godhead, and to efface every 
distinction between him and the Supreme Being, except a 
distinction that was economic or conceptual. This necessity 
was no doubt widely if not universally felt, and was simply and 
vividly expressed, for example, in the Second Epistle of 
Clement to the Corinthians, written in that age : — " ovtws Sei 
v/mas (ppovelv irep\ 'l^orov ^pUTTOu d>? irep\ Oeou, w? irep\ Kptrov 
Xwvtwv kcu veKpoov" Nothing can be more evident than that 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. $0<j 

the fourth Evangelist, in his application of the Logos-idea to 
the Christ, was at once obeying and satisfying an impulse 
which was common in the Church. 

From the first the Christian sentiment or consciousness con- 
tained in it an impulse to represent to itself the Christ the ideal 
man, as also God, and yet not God ; as divine in a sense in 
which no mere creature and no intermediate spirit could claim 
to be, and yet in some, as yet undetermined sense, subordinate 
to the ground of all existence. Paul himself, as already 
observed, experienced an impulse in this direction, and sought 
to qualify the divine attributes of Christ by the ideas of 
delegation and ultimate demission. But this solution did not 
satisfy the Christian consciousness, and did not sufficiently 
differentiate his nature and functions from those of other 
ministers of the divine purposes. The solution of the problem 
which satisfied the Church was only disclosed to the full by the 
fourth Evangelist and his Logos-idea. In the period which 
intervened between the epistles of St. Paul and the fourth 
Gospel, Paulinistic writers had, as we have seen, advanced 
beyond the Pauline position ; had laid aside the ideas of 
delegation and demission, and spoken of Christ as enjoying pre- 
eminence in all things, as being the pleroma of the Godhead, 
and the express image of His person ; had, in short, gone the 
length of investing him with titles and attributes, which found 
their justification and their counterpart in the doctrine of the 
Logos. But these writers never applied to him this designation 
itself. This final step was reserved for the fourth Evangelist, 
who thus completed the circle of Christological thought, and 
gave to it a consistency and finality, to which the heretical 
gnosis had nothing to oppose. 

A minor presumption in favour of the course of Christological 
development here suggested is afforded by the close parallelism 
between it and the emergence of the monotheistic faith in the 
religion of Israel. The critical study of the Old Testament has 
shown that Jehovah, who as the national God of Israel was at 
first only one among a multitude of gods with a localized 
dominion, became in the course of time, and for the prophetic 
spirit, a Being who was above all gods. The others, who had 
been called gods, it has well been said, " lost first their rank, as 
they fell below Him, and then their existence," as the conviction 
grew that there could be but one God, whose dominion was 



5IO THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

over all. Even so, by a kindred process, Christ was raised for 
the Gnostic, i.e., the speculative Gentile mind, to the peerless 
altitude and dignity in which he is presented to us in the fourth 
Gospel. To the speculative mind, he seemed at first to be but 
one among the many aeons or sons of God. Then, as we may 
perhaps see from the glimpse we get of a passing phase of 
thought in the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians, he 
rose to a position of pre-eminence among them. Not that the 
writers of these epistles, or that Pauline Christians generally, 
were satisfied with such a view, but probably that, in combating 
the Gnostic tendency of thought, they used in speaking of Christ 
a phraseology which, by way of accommodation, met half way 
the ideas current among the heretically inclined. And, lastly, 
all other divine powers having thus lost their rank, next lost 
their existence, as we see in the prologue of the fourth Gospel 
and in First Timothy, the conviction being there expressed that 
Christ alone sustained the whole mediatorial function ; for that, 
by the assignation to him of a place hard by the Throne of 
God and of a universal function, there was no room left in the 
divine administration for the action of any other divine energy. 
He became the one sole link between the great First Cause and 
the creature, the one sole medium of communication and of 
intercourse between heaven and earth — the sole channel of 
divine agency. The monotheistic principle in Israel doubtless 
required centuries for its development or general recognition, 
whereas the Christological development was, as might be 
expected, the work of little more than a generation between the 
time at which the Gentile element inundated the Church and 
the date of the fourth Gospel. 

According to the Logos-idea, the divine nature exists in a 
twofold form, in one of which God remains for ever in unbroken 
seclusion, at rest within Himself, apart from all contact and 
defilement with finite existence. In the other, He proceeds 
forth from Himself to manifest His hidden, self-contained, and 
self-sufficing nature in the creation and government of the 
world. This latter is the Logos, the source of all that is finite, 
the hypostasis and impersonation of the power and virtue of 
that Being who is the ultimate ground of all existence ; and 
who, while He manifests Himself by going forth to create and 
govern the universe, yet remains withdrawn within Himself. 
The Evangelist adopted this idea, and regarded the Logos as 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 I I 

incarnated in Christ, as personally manifested in Him under the 
limitations of humanity ; so that for those who could not discern 
the divine presence as manifested in the world at large, it 
became bodily visible as manifested in the flesh. As the incar- 
nation or dwelling-place of the Logos, Christ is for him the 
Son of God, in the archetypal sense, and occupies the very 
closest conceivable relation to the Most High. He is, in truth, 
the other Self of God, and only economically short of absolute 
identification with Him. He is infinitely raised above all 
rivalry and confusion with other celestial powers, however 
exalted ; or, rather, his agency is so pervasive and universal as 
practically to exclude all such. It may be a question whether 
the Evangelist conceived of the Logos as absolutely merged in 
the Christ, but the dwelling-place of the Logos is in Christ in 
such a sense that they are practically one ; and all power is 
centred in him, who as Redeemer has conferred on man the 
highest benefit ; has given to man the best proof of his tenderest 
love and goodwill, and is therefore an object of man's pro- 
foundest love and veneration. In him too the human mind 
may find a resting-place for its devout imagination, and become 
reconciled to the existence of an impenetrable mystery. He is 
the immediate source of light and life to men. By his all- 
pervading virtue and sole mediation, all other members of the 
heavenly hierarchy are deprived of consideration ; extinguished, 
so to speak, in the blaze of his glory, and rendered superfluous 
and irrelevant. The mind of the individual believer is relieved 
from the seductive, idolatrous necessity of filling up the interval 
between God and man with intermediate powers ; a bound is 
set to the encroachment of the mythological spirit, and an 
object is presented to the human soul, of mystical meditation, 
on which it may pour forth its emotions and sympathies in all 
their depth of fulness, without danger of offending or enfeebling 
the monotheistic sentiment. 

Two views may be taken of the mental process, by which the 
Evangelist fastened upon the Logos-idea as the solution of the 
Gnostic problem. It may have recommended itself to him 
either because it seemed to supply for the Christian sentiment 
a form more adequately expressive than the pre-existing 
Paulinistic form of the Christological idea, more conservative of 
the orthodox spirit, and more fitted to satisfy the speculative 
craving for something definite ; or, on the other hand, the 



512 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Logos-idea may have determined and moulded his view of the 
Christology and of Christian doctrine generally. In other 
words, that idea may have been laid hold of by him, because it 
seemed to supply the best apologetic form for Christian doctrine ; 
or, it may have laid hold of him independent of and prior to 
such a consideration, and so as to revolutionize, ab initio, all 
his previous doctrinal views. Which of these two modes of 
looking at the Evangelist's mental process best represents it we 
do not pretend to say. They who are disposed to minimize 
the difference between the Pauline and Johannine dogma will 
probably prefer the former alternative. They to whom the 
difference seems more material will probably prefer the latter. 
The view of the nature of the Christ thus fixed by the applica- 
tion to him of the Logos-idea was exactly what was needed 
for the further development of Pauline Christology. The 
veneration which had gathered round the person of Christ as 
Redeemer would not allow of his being made to occupy any 
lower relation to God than the very highest ; and the Logos 
was the only Being on whom, without dishonour to the Father 
of all, a devout monotheist, such as the fourth Evangelist, could 
own himself absolutely dependent for his religious experience. 
He could feel that his devotion to Christ, considered as the 
incarnate Logos, did not in any way trench on his devotion to 
the Supreme God ; and in fact that these were but one and the 
same devotion. And it is easy to see that a doctrine such as 
this, clearly and authoritatively stated so as to establish itself 
in the mind of the Church, would sweep away all speculation as 
to ranks of intermediate and angelic powers, which necessarily 
seemed to remove God to an inaccessible distance, inconsistent 
with the central ideas of atonement and reconciliation, which are 
the specific and essential elements of the dogmatized Christian 
consciousness. The definition of the nature of Christ by the 
Logos-idea may be regarded as, in some sense, a compromise 
between orthodoxy and Gnosticism : a formal concession on the 
part of the former, but a substantial or material concession on 
the part of the latter. It was a speculation which outdid or 
swallowed up all others on the subject. It foreran the drift, 
and overtook or determined the goal of orthodoxy, while it 
satisfied the speculative spirit of Gnosticism. 

The great achievement then of the fourth Evangelist con- 
sisted in bringing the Christological development to a relatively 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 I 3 

satisfactory close, or at least in securing a position of pre- 
eminence to Christ, which the age could accept as conclusive. 
He raised a barrier against the encroachments of ethnic specu- 
lations, which were neither germane nor relevant to the nature 
of Christianity, and it determined the line of subsequent 
doctrinal development in the Catholic Church. He supplied 
the missing keystone to the arch of Pauline dogma by bringing 
together in Christ the absolute essence of the divine nature 
with its historical manifestation in human form. To that 
dogma he gave the necessary coherence and solidity by means 
of that speculative idea which was laid to his hand by Greek 
and Hellenistic philosophy. Just as we have seen that St. 
Paul effected a complete breach between Judaism and Christi- 
anity by applying Jewish categories to the interpretation of his 
own experience, so did the fourth Evangelist save Christianity 
from a relapse into polytheistic ideas by applying to the person 
of its founder an idea which he borrowed from the speculative 
thought of Gentile philosophy. 

The Logos-idea was not the only contribution which the 
Evangelist took from Hellenism. Many of the details in his 
Gospel evince his leaning towards Hellenistic thought. When, 
for example, he represents Jesus as saying, " My father worketh 
hitherto, and I work," this implies that he believed in a cease- 
less action of God, which has a prominent place in the 
theosophy of Philo, but is singularly opposed to the sabbatic 
idea of the Old Testament. But a much stronger evidence of 
Hellenistic influence may be seen in the undisguised but 
restrained dualism which pervades the fourth Gospel, and has 
continued from this source to taint, more or less, the dogma of 
the Church to the present time. This strange-visaged element 
in the Gospel may possibly, yet hardly, be accounted for by 
regarding it as a popular or literary means of explaining 
certain phenomena in an age of sudden conversions and sudden 
apostasies. But certain it is that the Evangelist does not earn- 
out his dualism with the same consequence and to the same 
dangerous extreme as it was carried out in the heretical 
Gnosticism. He goes so far as to imply that human beings arc 
divided into two classes — men of the spirit, and men of the 
flesh ; men who are of God, and men who are not of God ; 
men from above, and men from below — and that the result of 
the action and revelation of the Logos varies according to the 

2 K 



514 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

nature of its subjects. The office of the Logos is not to redeem 
the evil, or to mediate their translation into the other class. 
He does not so much bring forth anything absolutely new as 
bring forth the original and native good or evil into mani- 
festation. This is a view of human nature and its possibilities, 
which, if carried out, leads to dualism of the most pronounced 
character, and being common to Greek or Hellenistic thought, 
and to the fourth Gospel, is a proof of the dependence of the 
latter upon the former, and of the affinity between them. But 
upon these and other traces of Hellenistic influence in the 
fourth Gospel we do not need to dwell. They are only 
mentioned here because they help, by an accumulation of 
evidence, to overcome the prejudice in many minds against 
admitting the Hellenistic source of the Logos doctrine in the 
fourth Gospel, and the presence of Hellenistic elements gener- 
ally in the dogmatic structure of Christianity. While in those 
epistles, to which the term deutero-Pauline is applied, Hellen- 
istic elements are introduced sparingly, covertly, and, as it were, 
piece-meal and incidentally, without acknowledgment and 
perhaps unconsciously, the fourth Evangelist appropriates the 
great Hellenistic idea or philosopheme of the Logos without 
disguise, and even places it in the forefront of his Gospel as if 
it were familiar to his readers, besides laying it as the founda- 
tion of a conception of Christianity entirely new and higher 
in its mysticism than that which had previously prevailed. 

By the application which it makes of this idea, the fourth 
Gospel may be said to have given a new complexion to the life 
of Jesus and to Christian doctrine, while still keeping the 
Paulinistic line of development; or, rather, to have added a 
second summit to the dogmatic mass, elevating it to a height 
on which the mystics of all ages have delighted to fix their 
gaze. It has never indeed been perfectly incorporated or com- 
prehended in the more practical dogma of the Church, but it 
has been largely made use of as a canon for the interpretation 
of Pauline Christology. It is not merely the designation and 
the general idea of the Logos w T hich the Evangelist has 
borrowed from Philo; but many of the predicates and figures of 
speech which Philo has applied to the Logos are reproduced by 
the Evangelist in reference to Christ. When Philo calls the 
Logos a second God and a Paraclete, and says that the manna 
in the wilderness was an allegory of the Logos, the parallelisms 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 I 5 

in the Gospel make it impossible to doubt that the writer drew 
his inspiration from the Hellenist. Dr. Cairns says that the 
Logos doctrine, as set forth by Philo, has " but a scant relation 
to redemption, or to man's recovery to God"; but so far as this 
is true he only thereby suggests another, though negative and 
indirect, proof of the identity of the Logos of the Hellenist and 
of the Evangelist. For it has been pointed out by Pfleiderer, 
and by many other theologians, that redemption, in the Pauline 
sense at least, is not among the functions which the Evangelist 
ascribes to Christ. According to the latter the death of Christ 
is not a vicarious sacrifice, but only the highest manifestation of 
his love and submission to the will of the Father. He takes 
away the sin of those whom the Father has given to him by 
purifying them from the evil that is in them, and this he does 
by the exhibition of the love and gracious purpose of the 
Father. 

It must indeed be admitted that the Logos of the Evangelist 
differs from that of the Alexandrian in two respects, which may 
be said to be one. The Logos of the latter is a being of a 
wholly transcendent nature, whereas the incarnation or descent 
into the finite nature of humanity is essential to the conception 
of the Evangelist's Logos. And secondly, the one is presented 
to us as the moral ideal of humanity, which the other never is 
nor could well be, until he was conceived of as incarnate. 
These differences may be said to be fundamental, and indeed 
are so in such a sense as to lend an air of plausibility to the 
position of Harnack that the Logos of the Evangelist has 
" little but the narrie in common with the Logos of Philo." 
But this position will be seen to have little to recommend it, if 
we consider the long and eventful history of the Logos-idea — 
almost as little indeed as if it had been said that the God of the 
Old Testament had "little but the name in common" with the 
God of the New Testament. It was Heraclitus — who lived 
fully six centuries before the age of the Evangelist, and in that 
district of Asia Minor where the Gospel is believed to have 
seen the light — who discovered the elasticity and speculative 
possibilities of the term Logos, and started it on its long career. 
Professor E. Pfleiderer directs attention to this fact, and calls 
Heraclitus the philosophical father of the term. After him it 
was taken up and largely used by the early Stoic schools of 
Greece to express a function of the deity. Next it made its 



5 1 6 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

appearance in the writings of the Alexandrian Hellenist, who 
extended and emphasized its application so as to express by its 
means a hypostasis of the divine energy. But it has been sup- 
posed, not unfairly, that this use of the word had a " double 
root," and that this fruitful extension of its meaning was 
suggested to Philo by that highly figurative personification of 
divine wisdom, which occurs with such striking effect in the 
canonical Book of Proverbs, and in the apocryphal Book of 
Wisdom, in which divine Wisdom is represented as speaking and 
acting as a separate personality. The poetical Hebrew fancy 
had only to be understood literally (which it was very apt to 
be) to bring it together with the Logos. The two ideas could 
hardly but be felt to be cognate, or, we may say, identical and 
suggestive of each other. By the extension of its meaning thus 
suggested, the speculative idea was transformed, and it had 
elasticity enough to undergo yet another extension or another 
transformation by embracing in itself the Christology of St. 
Paul, and so to give us the Logos of the Evangelist. From a 
merely speculative point of view the transformation which the 
Logos underwent at the hands of Philo is quite as great and as 
fundamental as it underwent at the hands of the Evangelist. 
As the term was enriched and fructified by contact in the mind 
of Philo with Hebrew poetry, so it was yet further enriched and 
fructified by contact in the mind of the Evangelist with the 
Christology of St. Paul. The one step in the development of 
the idea was quite as conceivable as the other. Besides the 
"name," the Logos of Philo had the idea of a hypostasis of the 
divine energy "in common with" that of fhe Evangelist. The 
speculative elasticity of the word which admitted of its extension 
by Philo also admitted of its further extension by the Evan- 
gelist. Indeed, considering the perplexity and helplessness of 
the Pauline party in the Church when confronted by Gnostic 
speculation, the wonder is that the Logos-idea was so long of 
being applied to the Christ. We may admit that what the Old 
Testament had said of the Messiah and of the suffering servant 
of God, together with its personification of the Word and Wis 
dom of God (i Cor. i. 24), may have helped St. Paul to his 
dogmatic interpretation of the life and function of Christ. But 
all these together could never have suggested to the fourth 
Evangelist his distinctive conception of Christianity. He could 
only have arrived at that by his identification of the Christ 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 I 7 

with the Hellenistic Logos, in which Greek speculation and 
Hebrew poetry were already fused in one to his hand. This 
idea forms the key to the whole thought of his Gospel, and 
when once disclosed to his mind may almost be said to have 
created a necessity for the composition of a Gospel, all whose 
details, down to the most minute, grow out of it and group 
themselves round it. We are of course aware of the contention 
of many theologians that in designating Christ as # the Logos 
the Evangelist was anticipated by the writer of the Apokalypse 
(xix. 13), and therefore indebted presumptively to Jewish 
thought. Now, there are unquestionably many points of 
affinity between the Gospel and the Apokalypse. The designa- 
tions Lamb and Logos are applied to Christ in both, and there 
are various other ideas and expressions common to both. But 
it is no less unquestionable that the general spirit and tone of 
thought are very wide apart, perhaps as much so as in the 
case of any two books in Scripture. Weizsacker considers the 
two books to be so unlike that they cannot proceed from the 
same hand, but so like as to prove that they proceed from the 
same school of Christian doctrine. While emphasizing the 
affinities, this writer contends that they are not due to the 
Evangelist having borrowed from the Apokalyptist. He may 
be right in this conclusion, but the reason, which he assigns for 
it, does not, we think, display that range and critical discern- 
ment which are so conspicuous in his recent work. He says 
that the Gospel is too original and peculiar to be a translation 
of the materials of the Apokalypse into a higher form of doctrine. 
This reasoning is not satisfactory, because it might be used also 
to disprove the Evangelist's obligation to the synoptists, though, 
if there be anything certain in Biblical criticism, it is that the 
Evangelist has shown his genius and originality just in adopting 
many of the synoptic materials, and weaving them into a piece 
with a conception of Jesus much higher than theirs. We may 
say of the Evangelist what has in various language been often 
said of Shakespeare, that he " has refashioned, after a nobler 
pattern, materials already at hand, so that the relics of other 
men's poetry are incorporated into his perfect work " (Walter 
Pater, Appreciations, p. 188). And proceeding on the supposi- 
tion of the prior publication of the Apokalypse in its present 
form, the probability is that the Evangelist has made the same 
use of materials in it suitable to his purpose. Indeed, if that 



5 I 8 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

supposition be correct he had a manifest motive for dealing 
with the materials of the synoptists and of the Apokalyptist in 
the same way. In the synoptists there lay before him a record 
accepted by the Church of the earthly life of Jesus, and the 
Apokalypse contained glimpses, also accepted by the Church, 
of the heavenly life of Jesus. And it being the Evangelist's 
design to compose a Gospel, in which the heavenly life 
should shine through or blend with the earthly life, he had the 
same motive to adapt materials which the one as well as the 
other laid to his hand. We may readily believe, therefore, that 
he has followed the Apokalyptist in styling Christ the Lamb 
and the Word of God. This is one view of the relation in 
which the fourth Gospel and the Apokalypse stand to each 
other. But we shall see that quite another and perhaps a 
more probable view may be taken of their relation. In the 
meantime, however, we shall keep to the former view. 

According to the Apokalyptist, the Christ is known and 
adored in heaven as the Lamb of God, advanced to the highest 
rank, and to a seat upon the throne of the universe. And all 
that the Evangelist does in his adaptation of the title is to give 
it a new setting, letting it be applied to Christ by his fore- 
runner, the Baptist, at the very commencement of his ministry 
on earth, in anticipation of his future glory, as it came to be 
recognized in the heavenly sphere ; but he dismisses it in a 
single sentence, as if he felt that, considering the frequent and 
exhaustive use of it by the Apokalyptist, this solitary reference 
was enough for his purpose, of connecting his view with that 
already current in the Church. The other designation again of 
the " Word of God " being applied by the Apokalyptist to Jesus, 
only once, and in an incidental manner, gives freer scope to the 
Evangelist's genius. This, therefore, he takes up, charges it 
with a new meaning, elsewhere derived, and makes it the key- 
note or watchword of his whole Gospel. And if so, we have 
here the most striking example of the imaginative skill and of 
the artistic method with which he seeks to impress organic 
unity and mystical elevation upon the whole system of Christian 
thought, to which the religion of Jesus had given rise. In the 
Apokalyptist's use of the word Logos there is nothing to show 
that more is meant than that Christ had revealed the will of 
God, and was the absolute and infallible authority for Christian 
doctrine ; that, just as a man's word reveals his thought, so 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 I 9 

Christ is called the Word of God, because he had revealed the 
thought and purpose of God. Used in this sense, the name has 
nothing in common with the speculative, mystical, or meta- 
physical idea, which the Evangelist lays as the basis or 
watchword of his Gospel. There is no book in the New Testa- 
ment which more evidently than the Apokalypse betrays a 
leaning to the Jewish-Christian position of legalism and ex- 
clusiveness ; and we cannot easily be induced to believe that the 
idea which underlies its designation of the Christ as the Word 
is the Logos-idea of the Evangelist, which carries in it the 
principle of universalism. A very obvious criticism indeed of 
the Apokalypse is, that the exclusive spirit is not invariably and 
consistently maintained by it ; and that in some passages it 
lapses or rises into universalism. But, on the supposition that 
the book is of one casting, this wavering and unsteadiness of its 
standpoint are enough to show that the writer has not laid hold 
of the Logos-idea of the Evangelist. And this other considera- 
tion is to be taken into account, that had that idea been in the 
Apokalyptist's mind, some traces of it might reasonably be 
expected to have found their way into the Paulinistic literature, 
which holds a position logically at least intermediate between 
the Apokalypse and the fourth Gospel, whereas of such traces 
there is an entire absence. While therefore we grant that the 
Evangelist may have derived the term from the Apokalyptist, 
we say that the meaning or content which he thought into it 
was his own ; or, if not his own, yet derived by him not from 
the Apokalyptist, but from Greek or Hellenistic speculation, and 
made his own by the new and personal application which he 
gave to it. The affinity between the two writers shows itself, 
as well as in some details, in the general design common to both, 
of carrying the Christ towards the height at which he ceases to 
be a creature, without infringement of the monotheistic principle : 
towards the point at which, while differentiated from God, he is 
yet one with Him. This design or postulate of the dogmatic 
consciousness was, however, not peculiar to the Apokalyptist 
and the Evangelist, but common to the whole Christian Church. 
What the Apokalyptist failed to supply, and what the Evangelist 
did supply, was the speculative idea or intellectual form which satis- 
fied that postulate. And readers will be pleased to observe that, 
while we deny the obligation of the Evangelist to the Apokalyptist 
in respect of the Logos, we refer not to the term but to the idea. 



5 20 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

In the foregoing remarks upon the derivation of the Logos- 
idea we have proceeded on the supposition that the Apokalypse 
could not have borrowed the term Logos from the fourth Gospel. 
But in view of much of the criticism which has in recent years 
been directed upon the former, this is far from certain. And we 
prefer quite another view from that now given of the relation in 
which Rev. xix. I 3 stands to the prologue of the Evangelist. 
Very strong reasons have been assigned for supposing that the 
Apokalypse is not of one casting, but the work of many hands 
at different dates. Chancellor Weizsacker, in his great work 
{Das Apostolische Zeitalter), gives it as his opinion that while 
the main portion was in existence before or about the fall of 
Jerusalem, other portions were probably of thirty years later 
date. Another critic, Volter, has come to the conclusion that 
the book did not assume its canonical form till about the year 
1 40 A.D., in which case the verse xix. 1 3 may be an interpolation 
or allusion to the prologue of the fourth Gospel. The clause, 
" his name is called the Word of God," has much the character 
of an " aside " or marginal note, and suggests the question, 
" by whom is he so called ? " and the reply is at least not un- 
natural, that the interpolator had the fourth Evangelist in view. 
A glance at the verse and context is sufficient to show that the 
sentence interrupts the sequence of the passage in which it 
occurs, and is out of harmony or connection with the description 
of the Christ as a warrior whose " garments are dipped in 
blood," and with " a name known only to himself," seeing that 
in the very passage itself the name Logos, than which there can 
be none greater, is divulged. Yet further, the title " Word of 
God" is made no further use of, and has no affinities with the 
rest of the book; but is thrown in hurriedly, as it were, into a 
book already completed, too late to have its character and 
contents modified by the new idea — a circumstance very 
noticeable when contrasted with the dominating position which 
the idea holds in the fourth Gospel. But the main thing to be 
borne in mind is that the parallelism is merely verbal ; and 
that, as already said, the name as applied by the Apokalyptist 
to Christ has nothing in common with the speculative, mystical, 
or metaphysical idea, which the Evangelist lays as the basis and 
watchword of his Gospel. Want of space will not permit us to 
dwell upon the most recent theory as to the composition of the 
Apokalypse, propounded in 1886 by a young German theo- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 2 I 

logian (Bernhard Vischer), according to which it was a Jewish 
apokalypse transformed, by interpolation and otherwise, into the 
canonical book of Revelation. But we may briefly say that, in 
our judgment, after a careful study of it, this theory, if not 
altogether free from objection, is at least more free from such 
than any of the innumerable theories that have been started 
from time to time, in ancient and modern times, to harmonize 
the strange and seemingly incongruous features of the book ; 
and that, startling as the theory is, it gains a certain proba- 
bility from the completeness with which it seems to solve the 
enigma. 

For us, who do not believe in the theory of inspiration or in 
the special election of the people of Israel, it is a matter of no 
interest or concern to maintain the purely Hebraic origin and 
descent of the great ideas which entered into the construction of 
dogmatic Christianity. On the contrary, it is gratifying to 
perceive that ethnic elements of thought entered into this great 
scheme, and that, as Dr. E. Pfleiderer puts it, the middle wall 
of partition between Jew and Gentile has been taken down, 
intellectually as well as spiritually. It is thus made to appear 
that a system of ideas, which has enchained and satisfied so 
many generations of men in the most civilized nations of the 
earth, was the outcome of the growing thought and speculation 
of both sections of the pre-Christian world — a result or conclu- 
sion deserving all the attention we are here paying to it. The 
case is somewhat different with the doctrine of Jesus ; for that 
doctrine probably came down to him, as was formerly pointed 
out, from a purely Hebrew or Jewish source, being made up of 
the elements in it of natural religion, which are more or less 
common to all nations, only revised by his personal insight, 
and invested with fresh power by being carried into life, and 
pathetically illustrated in their noblest aspect by his death. With 
this explanation, we say that we have no sympathy with those 
theologians who maintain that the doctrine of the Logos grew 
naturally and spontaneously out of an exclusively Jewish root ; 
or that Jewish thought and feeling were sufficient here and else- 
where to determine the course of the development of positive 
Christian theology. 

There are, no doubt, in the canonical and apocryphal literature 
of the Jews expressions which may be regarded as "early 
anticipations" of the Logos-idea in its application to the Christ. 



5 22 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

In the Old Testament we read that God said, and it was done ; 
that He commanded, and it stood fast ; that by His word were 
the heavens made, and by His wisdom was the earth spread out. 
In such passages the word and wisdom of God are spoken of as 
the agents and instruments of creation ; and in well-known 
passages in the book of Proverbs, as well as in Wisdom and 
Ecclesiasticus, the thought is taken up, and a turn is given to 
it, of which an important use was made in Hellenistic literature. 
In these books the word or wisdom of God is spoken of as if 
it were disengaged from the divine subject, and formed a sepa- 
rate existence with a will and purpose of its own. But this 
mode of speaking is plainly nothing but a highly poetical 
personification of the energy by which God created and estab- 
lished the world ; whereas the Logos of the Greek schools was 
a seriously-meant, speculative, or philosophical idea, expressive 
of the form in which the great Unseen manifests Himself in the 
creation and government of the world, and reveals Himself to 
the soul of man. These two uses of the word, though so 
materially different, yet superficially bear such a degree of re- 
semblance to each other, that the Alexandrian Hellenist, in the 
way usual with him of putting a Jewish stamp on philosophic 
ideas, and bringing the prose of Mosaic legislation and the 
poetry of Jewish chokmah and prophecy into close relation 
with Gentile speculation, could treat them as identical, and 
translate the poetical fancy into a theologoumenon. The 
distinction between a serious attempt to fathom the depths of 
the divine nature and a poetic or fanciful description of an 
accepted theory of the divine action was entirely overlooked or 
intentionally ignored by him. We may observe in passing that 
Philo seems, in his treatment of this matter, to have been 
anticipated, or at least countenanced to some extent, by rab- 
binical theology, which, probably following out the hint given 
in the above-mentioned books, applied the designation memra, 
or word, to a personal organ of the divine will, who mediated 
between God and Israel, and made atonement for sin. But it 
was by a stroke of genius that Philo perceived that the Greek 
Logos, with its double signification, was by its elasticity better 
fitted than the Jewish Memra or the Greek Sophia, to be of 
service in the theosophic speculations in which he was engaged. 
And it was an act of still greater genius by which the fourth 
Evangelist not only adopted the same idea, but also applied it 






tup: christian religion. 523 

to the Christ, to represent him as the personal and visible 
manifestation of that divine energy which the Alexandrian had 
in view. Philo has thus the merit of evolving and elaborating 
out of Jewish and Hellenic elements the philosophical and 
speculative form in which the fourth Evangelist could best 
express the doctrinal conception which he had formed of the 
Christ, and lay a deeper basis for the Christology of the Church, 
if not the merit also of even suggesting to the mind of the 
Evangelist the very conception itself which he brought to bear 
on his idealistic construction of gospel history. 

Through Greek and Hellenistic literature the Logos-doctrine 
was widely spread, but it wandered or floated about, like many 
other speculative ideas, without establishing itself very deeply in 
the convictions of men, because it was felt to be only one of 
many competing speculations, without attachment to fact and 
without historical embodiment. But the fourth Evangelist, by 
connecting it with the person of Christ, gave it a local habita- 
tion, and therefore a new power or hold over men's minds, 
suggesting to the unconverted on the one hand that Christ 
might be the very being in whom that idea was realized, and, 
to Christians on the other, investing him with a unique and 
specific dignity which justified the payment to him of divine 
honours, and supplied a want in the region of theological 
thought, of which both believers and unbelievers, the cultivated 
and the uncultivated, were sensible ; besides cutting away the 
ground from under the Gnostic propagandism, which in many- 
quarters threatened to efface the ethical character of the new- 
religion and to rend the Church in pieces. If it was a mere 
speculation like those of Gnosticism, yet it was one which sup- 
planted those others, and in which earnest and devout souls 
could find rest for their intellect and fancy. The abrupt manner 
in which the Evangelist, without preface or explanation of any 
kind, introduces the mention of the Logos is enough to show 
that he is addressing those who were not unfamiliar with the 
word ; and that he only intends to define more clearly, and to 
give concrete form and attachment to the idea, of which up till 
then they had only a vague and abstract notion. 

To assert that the Evangelist did not, or could not, derive 
his doctrine of the Logos from Greek or Hellenistic speculation, 
because in his hands it grew to be something very different 
from the form which it took in Hellenistic theosophy, or 



524 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

because there are moments of thought involved in the former 
which are not to be found in the doctrine of Philo, is not much 
to the point. It is rather an example of that formal and 
wooden criticism, of which the apologetic theologian is apt to 
avail himself. Not long ago it was said by a prominent apologist 
in this country (Dr. Cairns), to whom we have already referred, 
that the doctrine of Philo as to the personality of the Logos is 
wavering and uncertain ; that he sometimes distinguishes the 
Logos from God, and sometimes identifies both ; that he speaks 
of the Logos as a second god, or a second to God, or as His 
only begotten son, and His instrument in making and govern- 
ing the world ; but that it is "impossible to develop his hints 
into distinctive Christianity," because his Logos doctrine has 
but a scant relation to redemption and man's recovery to God. 
Now, what, we ask, would this writer have ? What short of 
absolute identity would he accept as proof of any connection 
between the doctrine of Philo and that of the fourth Evangelist? 
How else, except by a great transformation of the philosophic 
Logos-idea, and of its significance, could it be incorporated or 
brought into harmony with its new relations. The term and 
the abstract idea were adopted by the Evangelist to define the 
super-angelic elevation of the Christ ; but under his hand the 
idea necessarily acquired elements of a novel character. Kin- 
dred cases may teach us that such transformations do not 
invalidate the fact of connection between two ideas, or the 
derivation of the one from the other. The mythologies of all 
nations contain striking examples (as pre-eminently was the case 
in ancient Egypt) of the transmutation of heroes and demi- 
gods by the contraction or extension of their attributes ; and 
even the gods themselves frequently change their distinctive 
characters, and appropriate those of each other. So, too, there 
is not a doubt in the minds of competent investigators that 
festivals, originally growing out of nature-worship, were incor- 
porated with the religion of Israel, and gradually moulded by a 
process of denaturalization into harmony with its growing ethical 
requirements till they assumed quite a new significance, and 
underwent such a transformation that the radical identity of the 
old and new forms is hardly recognizable by the ordinary 
student. And there is, or ought to be, as little doubt that the 
Christian system of thought was determined in its line of 
development by affluence from speculative systems with which 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 525 

it had otherwise little or nothing in common. It would not 
be the only instance in the history of human thought, in which 
an idea comparatively meaningless and infertile in the system 
of which it was originally a component member, has started 
into new life and significance when removed from connection 
with that system and placed in connection with quite another 
system of thought. 

The "distinctive" feature of the gospel, into which (according 
to Dr. Cairns) it is impossible to develop the hints of Philo, 
consists in its representation of Christ the Logos as the ideal 
and Saviour (Redeemer) of humanity. Now, it seems to us 
that this is not so impossible as Dr. Cairns asserts. It may 
be that a redemptive function of the Logos is not much 
emphasized or dwelt upon by Philo ; but there is at least a 
" hint " of something of the kind in those words of his quoted 
by Pfleiderer {Urchristenthum, p. 676): — "'0 avros iKerfjs /mev 
e<JTL tou Ov/jTOv, it pea /Sevres Se tov r/yejuovo?. oure ayevviiros w? 
6 Geo? cov, oure yevv)]TOS w? v/ixeig, oXXa ju.eaos twv aicpwv, ol/ul- 
(porepoi? o/uajpevoov" etc. The hint thus given by Philo of a 
redemptive function is real, though it may be scant, and indeed 
it could not be more until the Logos was embodied in a 
historical personage or a human subject. So far as there is a 
difference here between the Logos of Philo, and the Logos 
of the fourth Evangelist, it consists in this, that the 
mediating function of the former is essential to his nature, 
while that of the latter involves or presupposes his incar- 
nation and death upon the cross. And the alleged diffi- 
culty or impossibility of the development is quite imaginary, 
and is seen to be none at all so soon as we take the dogmatic 
situation into our field of view. That situation consisted in 
the fact that the Christ was regarded as the Ideal and Redeemer 
of humanity for many a year before the Evangelist thought of 
identifying him with the Logos ; but the moment this came 
into his mind — i.e., the moment he regarded the Logos-idea as 
descriptive of Christ's relationship to God — he necessarily in- 
corporated the exemplary character of the Christ and his 
redemptive function with that idea. And finally, the question 
is not, as Dr. Cairns seems to think, whether we can develop 
the hints of Philo into distinctive Christianity, but whether 
the Evangelist could do so. And there need be no difficulty 
in conceiving" how he could. When the Evangelist had taken 



526 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the step of identifying the Christ with the Logos it followed, 
as a matter of course, that he should also regard the Logos as 
the Ideal and Deliverer of man ; in other words, develop the 
hint of Philo into " distinctive Christianity." Dr. Cairns' 
difficulty arises from his having overlooked the evolution or 
historical succession of the ideas. In the course of this 
discussion we have had several opportunities for seeing that 
much depends upon keeping this succession in view, and that 
many obscurities are cleared up by this means. Considering 
the wide circulation and notoriety of the Logos-idea among the 
educated classes of that day it does indeed require some forti- 
tude to deny that the Evangelist might lay hold of it and wrest 
it from ethnic or Hellenistic philosophy for the use and elucid- 
ation of the Christological dogma, and for the glorification of 
the Founder of the Church. Only by a great transformation 
could he make it to fit in with the Christian dogma ; but 
fundamentally the idea, as employed by him, is identical with 
that of the schools of Greek philosophy and Alexandrine 
theology. The genius and originality of the Evangelist were 
displayed in discovering how, by its means, he could recast the 
Pauline dogma so as to present Christianity in more imposing 
form to the intellectual classes of that age, and reconcile the 
heretical sects which were exhausting the spiritual forces of the 
Church in internecine conflict, and spreading general alarm and 
anxiety for its safety among those who held to the Pauline 
form of doctrine. 

Long before the Logos-idea was taken up by the fourth 
Evangelist it had fascinated many minds and probably cir- 
culated as widely as Hellenic or Hellenistic thought. But, as 
already said, it floated vaguely as a mere speculation, which 
might or might not contain in it an element of truth. The 
circumstance that it fitted so exactly into the requirements 
of Paulinistic doctrine and came so opportunely to the rescue 
in the struggle with Gnosticism must, for many Gnostics as well 
as Paulinists, have amounted to a demonstration of its truth, 
giving it a hold which it never had before, and, for the great 
mass of Christians, turning the balance decidedly in favour of 
the Pauline or anti-Gnostic form of doctrine. We say here, 
" to Gnostics as well as Paulinists," for while to the latter the 
Logos-idea would only seem to be the perfect though hitherto 
missing articulation of their own dogmatic conception of Christ: 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 527 

to multitudes of the former the idea would come as a welcome 
escape from the sea of doubtful and perilous speculation on 
which, nolens volens, they were tossed. 

The Evangelist did not content himself with advancing his 
great and fruitful idea in a merely cursory, uncircumstantial, 
or epistolary fashion, as he seems to do in 1 John i. 1. Had 
he only done so, or had he even introduced it into the prologue 
of another version of the gospel history similar in character to 
those of the synoptists, it would have made but a faint 
impression on the mind of the Church, or might have seemed 
in that connection to be out of place, and have awakened a 
sense of incongruity. At most, the term Logos would have 
appeared to that age to be a literary expression for the ordinary 
Pauline dogma or only a chance speculation of little special 
moment, and most certainly would never have exerted that 
magical power which it seems to have exerted in composing 
the controversy then raging. That power it seems to have 
owed in a great measure to its being brought forward in the 
prologue of a new gospel — another, and yet not another — 
which took its tone and colour from the idea, and represented 
Christ not only acting as the Logos might be expected to act 
under human limitations, but also as bearing testimony to 
himself in language which fully justified the application of the 
Logos-idea to his person. By this expedient the Christ is 
made to invest this application of the idea with an authority 
which no reader could dispute who participated in that vener- 
ation for his person in which all Christians, even the Gnostically 
inclined, were at one. 

Whether the Christological doctrine of the fourth Gospel 
revealed itself to the mind of the Evangelist, or whether it was 
communicated to him by some one who went before him, is of 
no consequence. What we have to do is to trace, if we can, the 
steps by which the Paulinistic Christology was developed into 
that of the fourth Gospel. In this attempt we cannot pretend 
to trace the exact course of thought or train of reasoning by 
which the Evangelist or others before him arrived at his Christo- 
logical view ; nor, while offering suggestion's on this subject, do 
we suppose that all the terms and details of the process were 
consciously present to his mind. By the very nature of the 
case we must have recourse here to conjecture. 

We conceive then that the ground for the application of the 



528 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Logos-idea to Christ was already prepared by the Christology 
of St. Paul, and still more by that which found expression in 
the post-Pauline epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians. In 
these latter he is emphatically declared to be of a more godlike 
nature, and to have more of the divine power delegated to him 
than to all other members of the heavenly hierarchy. But how 
far he was superior, or in what his superiority consisted, is not 
declared. It is said of him indeed that all the fulness of the 
Godhead dwelt bodily in him. But this was simply an 
anti-Gnostic statement, which, standing alone without further 
definition, came near to the suggestion of a dual Godhead, and 
seemed to be, more even than the Gnostic doctrine, an assault 
upon the monotheistic principle. Manifestly the Church could 
not rest on such a formula. What the Church sought was to 
form to itself such a conception of Christ as would satisfy the 
Christian consciousness, i.e., justify that absolute veneration and 
unreserved devotion of which Christ was the object. To repre- 
sent him as the bodily fulness of the Godhead was rather a 
statement of the problem than its solution. The difficulty still 
remained to form a definite, intellectual conception of the Christ, 
and to find a place for him in the spiritual world. This problem 
was solved by means of the Logos-idea, which presented him 
not merely as a godlike Being, but as very God, yet without 
either obliterating the distinction between him and the Heavenly 
Father, or doing violence to the paramount monotheistic 
principle. 

Or yet again, we may conceive that the Evangelist, as a 
Paulinist to whom Christ was all in all, had yet become dis- 
satisfied with the Pauline dogma, because, owing to its vagueness, 
it did not supply a sufficiently clear and definite expression for 
his Christian consciousness, and seemed to leave some opening 
or pretext for Gnostic speculations, which were at variance with 
that consciousness. Let it not be said that we speak without 
warrant in imputing vagueness to St. Paul's Christological 
dogma. If the Church of later ages has not appeared to feel 
this vagueness of his dogma, and if theologians have been able 
to extract a high and distinct Christology from his epistles, let 
it be remembered that these have been read and studied in the 
light of the Logos-doctrine, and that they stand out in relief 
upon the fourth Gospel as their background. The important 
bearing which this circumstance has had on the interpretation 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 529 

of St. Paul's epistles can hardly be overstated. It has even 
been justified by the theory that the whole of the canonical 
books are to be treated as the production of a single divine 
mind — -a theory which has given to the orthodox interpreter an 
undoubting and imposing confidence in his hermeneutic; the aim 
of which is to demonstrate the harmony of Scripture, and to 
explain its vague and obscure portions by those that are clear 
and definite. It is needless to say that this is a canon of 
criticism which we do not accept ; and we return to the position 
that the rise of the Gnostic heresy, while it called forth the 
firm and sharply-defined Christology of the fourth Evangelist, 
has also to some extent to be accepted as a proof and conse- 
quence of St. Paul's vagueness of statement, or, let us say, of the 
unsettled and unfinished state of the current Christology. 

The Evangelist sought to obtain a more adequate and satis- 
factory Christological construction by identifying Christ with 
the Logos or Hypostasis of the all-pervasive divine energy. 
The Christ was thus placed in such immediate apposition to the 
ground of all existence and to the principle of causation, as to 
make of no account all those intermediate spirits which figured 
so largely in Gnostic doctrine, and to justify that sentiment of 
boundless veneration, of which, for the Evangelist, Christ the 
Redeemer was the object. To a man animated by that senti- 
ment this Christology seemed to be a postulate of consciousness, 
and to be its own evidence. But then the question arose how 
such a faith could be impressed on the minds of others, in whom 
that sentiment might not be so vivid, and in whom that con- 
sciousness might be wanting in depth and lucidity; or, in other 
words, how the inward and subjective evidence could be con- 
verted into an outward and objective evidence. For it must be 
observed that even the Pauline dogma, from which the Evangelist 
started, was not only vague, but also without any cjcar and 
obvious sanction in the Evangelical tradition. The authority 
of the Apostle, however imposing, was not sufficient to legitimate 
a conception of Christ's nature and person, so detached from 
the ground of history and so independent as his was. The 
step or leap which St. Paul had taken from the Jesus of tradi- 
tion to the Christ of dogma was stupendous. A sense of this 
expressed itself in St. Paul's own words (2 Cor. v. 16), " Though 
we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know 
we him no more." These words imply that the knowledge 

2 L 



530 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

which he or the Church at large had gained of Christ in conse- 
quence of his resurrection was utterly different from any 
knowledge that could be gained of him from the traditional 
memorials of his life in the flesh. The words as much as say 
that the Apostle himself could hardly recognize or find again 
the Jesus of tradition in the Christ of dogma. And there are 
indications in the synoptic Gospels that a perception of the same 
thing was not confined to his mind, but that a feeling existed in 
the Church that some justification was needed for this great 
stride in Christian thought ; or, let us say, for this dogmatic 
construction of the life and work of Christ ; and that such 
justification could only be found in the authoritative declarations 
of Christ himself. This feeling is seen to be at work in the 
Paulinistic Gospel of St. Luke, where, in the account of the 
apparition of Jesus to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, 
(xxiv. 27), it is said that "beginning at Moses and all the 
prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the 
things concerning himself" ; and where it is added that he ap- 
peared the same day to the other disciples, and expounded the 
Scriptures to them also, thus suggesting and giving his sanction 
to an interpretation of Scripture, which found in it frequent 
references to his own death and resurrection. Nay, as if this 
were not enough to account for the novelty of the apostolic 
dogma, the same Paulinist in his Acts of the Apostles, extends 
the period during which these Christophanies occurred, and 
states that Christ was seen of the disciples for forty days after 
the resurrection, and spoke to them of the things pertaining to 
the kingdom of God (Acts i. 3). Such representations were 
calculated to convey the impression that the disciples had got 
their higher knowledge of divine things from Jesus himself; and 
were, not improbably, made for that purpose, however uncon- 
sciously. By such mythical representations, the Church was 
enabled to account to itself for the apparent chasm or breach 
of continuity between the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels and 
the doctrine which prevailed in the Church ; and also to obtain 
a warrant for the use which was made of Old Testament 
Scripture. Some such warrant was felt to be necessary ; and 
this feeling operated no doubt, to some extent, in moulding 
in other respects the testimony of the synoptic records, and 
especially in introducing into them, here and there, a dogmatic 
element, as, e.g. y in Matth. xx. 28. 






THE CHRISTIAN. RELIGION. 53 I 

But the important part which this feeling played is to be 
chiefly seen in the origin and composition of the fourth Gospel, 
in regard to which the obvious remark has been made that the 
distinction between Christ in the flesh and Christ in the spirit is 
obliterated ; and that the historical Jesus has become the Logos 
in the flesh. In the Pauline epistles the historical Jesus or the 
Christ in the flesh had fallen into the background ; but so far is 
this from being the case in the fourth Gospel that the ideal or 
dogmatic greatness of Christ is carried back into his earthly life, 
so as to suffuse it with a higher glory. Dogma and history, 
which in Christian literature had hitherto been kept separate and 
apart, were in the fourth Gospel blended into organic unity. 
The object of the writer was to exalt the Christology and to 
raise a barrier to Gnostic speculation. For this end the exper- 
ience of the working of the evangelic principle which the 
Church by that time had accumulated, was represented as fore- 
shadowed in the events of the earthly life of Jesus ; and the 
dogmatic shape which his doctrine had assumed was anticipated 
in his teaching. The synoptic tradition had, as has been already 
pointed out, been enriched by a similar process ; but the fact 
that the fourth Gospel was so much later of publication, and 
that the experience of the Church had been so much enlarged 
in the interval, is sufficient to explain how the process could be 
carried out in this Gospel so much further than in the others. 
The discourses in it have for their subject, not, as in the latter, 
the nature of the kingdom of heaven and the conditions of an 
entrance into it ; but rather the nature and eternal sonship which 
had been ascribed by the Church to the speaker himself, and the 
conditions of fellowship with him. He is no longer the mere 
teacher, but the subject of his own teaching; and his doctrine is 
transformed into a dogma concerning him. The same trans- 
formation had in a manner been already effected by St. Paul, or 
by the Church at large ; but, besides that the Evangelist con- 
templated a further or hyper-Pauline transformation, he threw 
back his transformed doctrine into the teaching of Jesus, so as 
to invest it with more than Pauline or apostolic authority. 

Finally, that this great metamorphosis of the doctrine, whether 
as seen in the epistles of St. Paul or in the new Gospel, should 
be received without misgiving by the Church, the Evangelist put 
into the mouth of Jesus the promise that, after he was gone, he 
would send the Holy Spirit to guide the disciples into all (ruth 



5 32 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

(John xvi. 13). This promise, which occupies a prominent place 
in the Gospel, conveyed the idea that Jesus himself had not 
given utterance to all necessary truth ; and prepared the Church 
for new revelations. Probably it reflected an idea to that effect 
current in the Church ; and the danger of it was that it would 
not only justify developments in the line of Pauline doctrine, but 
also open the door to such unlicensed and fantastic notions as 
those of Montanism and other heresies, and so prepare fresh 
troubles for the Church, as indeed proved both then and in 
later ages to be the case. Still the idea gave countenance to 
the expectation that truths not attested or warranted by evan- 
gelic history or tradition, and not accessible to reason, might be 
conveyed from time to time, by a mysterious channel, to the 
mind of individuals or to the Church at large. And being pro- 
foundly impressed with the conviction that Christ was the divine 
Logos, the Evangelist, whoever he was, was also persuaded that 
that and other truths had been revealed to himself by the Spirit 
of Christ. And the question arose to his mind by what means he 
could also impress the same conviction on the minds of others, 
and secure for it a place in the creed of the Church. One thing 
could not but be obvious to him, that such an impression could 
not be made by his own authority, or by appealing to a revela- 
tion privately made by the Spirit to himself. He could not be 
unaware of the fact, which may be gathered from St. Paul's 
epistles and from some of the non-canonical writings, that St. 
Paul's visions and revelations were scouted and derided by his 
Jewish-Christian opponents ; and the Evangelist might well be 
afraid that the same treatment would be dealt out by his Gnostic 
opponents to any claim of his to a private revelation. He would 
perceive, therefore, that his Logos-doctrine must be presented to 
the Church, not as a private revelation, by the Spirit of Christ, 
to him or to any individual, so many years after Christ in 
person had left the earth, but as a revelation of Christ himself, 
by word of mouth or some other outward sign, to his disciples, 
while he was still in their company. It was with this in his 
view that the Evangelist ascribes to Jesus the words reported 
(xvi. 12-14) : "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye 
cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, 
is come, he will guide you into all truth," etc. Apologetic 
theologians, who regard these words as having been actually 
spoken by Jesus, explain by means of them that rich complex 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 33 

of doctrine in the apostolic epistles, and in the creeds of the 
Church, of which there is little or no indication in the simple 
teaching- of Jesus. They say that the Spirit promised by Jesus 
speaks through the apostles and the Church, completing his 
doctrine and supplying what he left unsaid ; and also, that by 
these words he prepared his disciples for such revelations. But 
on our supposition that no such words were spoken by Jesus, we 
have only to inquire what was the Evangelist's object in putting 
them into his mouth. And our reply is, that, being aware that 
his conception of the person of Jesus was far in advance of that 
which was traditional or current in the Church, he sought by 
these words to familiarize the Church with the expectation of 
further disclosures, supplementary to those which Jesus had 
made viva voce to his immediate followers, and among the rest, 
of course, to the disciple whom he loved, in whose name the 
fourth Gospel is written. But then the revelations here promised, 
supplementary to those reported by the synoptists and the 
fourth Evangelist, are, so far as we can see, just those which the 
Evangelist himself reports, with some inconsistency, as being- 
given viva voce by Jesus- Logos. The fact is that the Evangelist 
had two objects in view, which could only be reconciled by a 
certain degree of inconsistency. He wished to disarm the pre- 
judice which his report of the teaching of Jesus, on account of 
its novelty, would excite; and at the same time to represent 
that the Logos-doctrine, though novel to his readers as being 
over and above all that the ear-witnesses had reported, had yet 
the viva voce sanction of Jesus. This doctrine was novel to 
those who knew only the synoptic Gospels and the Pauline 
epistles; but it is not very evident what new or what higher 
doctrine remained to be disclosed to those who read the fourth 
Gospel. For it is hard to conceive that the practical mind of 
the great teacher could here have in view the difficult dialectic 
of St. Paul, or the scholastic subtleties of the later time, though, 
no doubt, there are minds which can believe even this. Thus 
much is plain, that when the fourth Gospel was published, or, let 
us say, when Jesus had uttered the discourses there reported, no 
cardinal element even of the dogmatic system remained to be 
disclosed to the Church. And we can see that the Evangelist 
does not entirely avoid inconsistency, but that he succeeds in 
doing so in so far as the case admitted. 

If any doubt aros^e in the Evangelist's mind as to the morality 



5 34 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

of such a representation, he would reflect that the revelation, as 
thus presented, was in substance the same as that which had 
been conveyed to his own mind, and only different in its mode 
of communication. The authoritative word of Christ himself, 
could it be appealed to, would be sufficient to legitimate that new 
departure in Christological doctrine which recommended itself 
to the Evangelist's own mind. That was a sanction which none 
would dispute, not even those who were Gnostically inclined. 
And out of the Evangelist's feeling that such was the case arose 
the project in his mind of a new redaction of the evangelic 
history, in which Jesus should be represented as claiming to be 
the incarnate Logos, and as living and acting in harmony with 
this claim. # 

Such a redaction behoved of course to be, to a large extent, 
unhistorical and untraditional — the vehicle not of a real but of 
an ideal and imaginary history — seeing that Jesus, in inter- 
course with his disciples, had advanced no such claim. And, 
indeed, there are not a few indications that the Evangelist was 
not unaware of the peculiar, not to say hazardous and critical 
nature of his undertaking. Of these one may be seen in his 
manner of descending from the high speculative ground of his 
prologue to the quasi-historical ground. It is impossible not 
to be struck with the abrupt and hurried way in which he 
passes from his statement that the Logos is the Creator of the 
world, and the source of all light and life to men, to the 
mention first of the Baptist as the witness to that light, and 
then to the mention of Jesus himself as its incarnation. It 
seems as if he hurried on not to commit himself to any state- 
ments as to the nature of the connection between the Logos 
and the human subject. The blank thus left between the 

* Jesus nowhere in the Gospel expressly claims to be the Logos. Indeed 
the word is never put into his mouth — a circumstance which Bishop Light- 
foot regards as a remarkable testimony to the credibility of the writer, seeing 
there would be a very " strong temptation to introduce it, which for a mere 
forger would be irresistible." But surely this is a mistake ; for, whether a 
forger or not, the Evangelist was certainly an artist of no mean degree, and 
to have put this word into the mouth of Jesus would have been to offend 
against that law of propriety, the observance of which is an unfailing mark of 
the true artist. The Logos is the philosophical idea which the Evangelist 
himself supplies as the key of the book. But it would have been out of place 
in the mouth of Jesus, whose language throughout is, and behoved to be, 
simple and popular. 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 535 

prologue and the rest of his Gospel is nowhere filled up. lie 
appears to have trusted that his theme would be substantiated 
to the satisfaction of his readers by the subsequent narrative, 
which is evidently drawn up for the express purpose of showing 
that the Logos dwelt in Jesus as in a tabernacle, and realized 
in him the ideal of humanity. In fact, the Logos doctrine is 
the key of the Gospel — so much so that while the synoptics 
exhibit a unity which is more or less common to all biographies, 
this other exhibits a unity which belongs to the drama with a 
presiding idea. It may here be noted that there is a blank, or 
break, at the end of the book, just like that here adverted to, 
at the beginning of the book. The difficulty for the Evangelist 
was to connect the Logos idea with the Christ, considered as 
incarnate, and making atonement by his death. And this 
difficulty he overcomes, in the one case as in the other, by 
what can only be called a tour de force. Having diverged from 
the synoptic tradition so far as to represent Jesus as claiming 
to be the Life and Light of men, the Evangelist then proceeds 
to re-enter the human current of the synoptic history, ending in 
the crucifixion ; and leaves unexplained how he who made this 
claim should yet have to submit to death, or what thus he 
added to his function. We can understand the death of the 
synoptic Jesus as that of a witness to the truth which he taught ; 
but no explanation can be given of the death of one who, before 
death, and by nature, was the Life of men. Of course, we do 
not mean to say that orthodox theologians cannot give an 
explanation of this, satisfactory to themselves. 

Our proposition, then, is that this Gospel was not designed 
by its author to be in any sense a narrative of the actual doings 
and sayings of Jesus, but to be a dramatic and imaginative 
representation of a life befitting one in whom the Logos had 
his dwelling. It was intended to place before the Church a 
new conception of Christianity and its Founder, not in the form 
of a doctrinal deduction from current tradition, such as St 
Paul had given in his epistles, but in the form of an imaginary 
history. John xx. 30-31 comes near to an admission to this 
effect. Its unknown author treats the early traditions of the 
life of Jesus with a freedom unknown to the synoptists. He 
seeks, not as they did, faithfully (Luke i. 1-2) to reproduce the 
facts of that life so far as their information went; but to mould 
them anew, so that a form of Christological doctrine, trans- 



536 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

cending that of St. Paul, might shine through them as through 
a closely-fitting, transparent vestment. And as the credit of 
inspiration enjoyed by the Old Testament had not, up to that 
time, been conceded to any of the apostolic writers, it was 
essential to his design that the doctrine should not merely be 
advanced on the authority of an apostle, real or pseudonymous, 
but should be authenticated by the witness of Jesus himself, 
which no believer would call in question. 

Various considerations have now been produced which may 
help us to conceive how the project of constructing such a 
narrative should have been formed in the mind of the Evan- 
gelist. But there is yet another consideration which may help 
us still further to understand his motive and procedure. Let it 
be remembered that the new religion from the first, and all 
along, had proved itself to be a great moral and spiritual power 
in men's lives. By St. Paul, and no doubt by the Evangelist 
also, this great outstanding fact was viewed as the consequence 
of the self-impartation of the divine life which was in Christ to 
those who believed. And the expectation was natural that 
this great power resident in Christ should have given some 
indication of its presence and operation during the earthly life 
of Jesus. But when the Evangelist turned to the synoptic 
tradition of that life he could scarcely but feel that it contained 
a somewhat disappointing record, and gave but few indications 
of that mighty power. He might account to himself for this 
apparent defect in various ways. At a time when the theory 
of the inspiration of the books of the New Testament had not 
established itself in the mind of the Church, he might suppose 
that the older evangelists had failed to give an adequate or 
appreciative report of that wonderful life ; that they had failed 
to apprehend or reproduce what was most spiritual or char- 
acteristic in it, and that what the tradition had not preserved 
could only be recovered by an imaginative history based on 
the Logos-idea, which, to his mind, gave the true key to that 
life. Or, again, he may have explained the defect to himself 
by supposing that the conditions or environment of his life 
upon earth did not suffer Jesus to manifest his proper self. A 
poet of the modern time has told us that " life itself may not 
express us all," and another has asked, " What act proved 
all its thought had been?" And if it be true that "a man's 
spiritual life may fall below the level of his deeds," the reverse 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 37 

is still more obviously true that a man's deeds may fall, or 
seem to fall, below the level of his spiritual life. There may 
be a spirit and a virtue in a man beyond his power of self- 
manifestation: for the power may be conditioned and limited 
by opportunity and external circumstance. The man may live 
and work in an inexpressive, stubborn, and impracticable 
element, just as, owing to the coarseness and intractability of 
his material, the soul of the • artist may never come to full 
expression in his works. The Evangelist may have felt more 
or less consciously that this was the case in regard to Jesus, 
and with the Logos-idea in his view he may have set himself to 
recast the tradition, and so to reconstruct it as to make it more 
expressive of the inner spirit and power of the life which formed 
its theme. 

Let it here be observed, too, that the Evangelist must have 
felt that a dogmatic construction like that of St. Paul did not, 
and could not, supply what he thought to be wanting in the 
synoptic Gospels. The Pauline dogma was a connected series 
or system in germ of propositions evolved from the subjective 
or mythical tradition of the life, death, and resurrection of 
Jesus. At the instance of what, in speaking of Keble, Newman 
calls " the living power of faith and love," and with the aid of 
a dialectic peculiar to itself, the Pauline dogma had put a 
meaning into the history greater than could be properly or 
logically evolved from it ; in other words, the dogma had out- 
run the historical position and taken up a position ahead of it. 
And in its turn the history was impelled to cover the ground 
by which it now fell short ; to place itself in line with the 
dogma, of which process we see a palmary example in Matth. 
xx. 28 and in Matth. xxvi. 26, as already remarked. The 
like process had now to repeat itself with a difference in the 
case of the fourth Gospel. The Logos-idea was a speculative 
advance beyond the Pauline dogma, and it was inevitable that 
the mythical history should seek to bring itself into line with 
this new form of the dogma. Only, that while in the former 
case the process went on unconsciously, and required the co- 
operation of two distinct subjects — the mythicist and the dog- 
matist — in the latter case it went on intentionally in one and 
the same subject, viz., the fourth Evangelist. He it was who 
both rose to the Logos-idea and brought the history abreast 
of it in his Gospel. We regard this Gospel therefore as a 



538 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

composition sui geneids, devised to inculcate in a form 
resembling the synoptic narratives, a view of the nature and 
work of Jesus, different from that which was conveyed in these 
narratives, but already accepted in the Church. In short, we 
regard it as a sort of extended apologue— a species of com- 
position in which a given moral or spiritual truth is set forth 
in the form of narrative, and in which it is immaterial whether 
the narrative be drawn from history or from fancy. 

But whether or not the Evangelist sought an explanation of 
it, there lay the fact before him that there was little or no sign 
or indication, no prefigurement or foreshadowing of the Logos- 
idea in the synoptic tradition. No doubt Jesus appeared in 
that tradition as a man " approved of God by miracles, and 
signs, and wonders"; but even the miracles which he was 
reported to have done afforded no evidence or warrant for 
regarding him as one with the Logos, the other self of God, 
the life and the light of men. Such physical and therapeutic 
miracles as he was said to have done, or even greater, had been 
performed by many of the prophets and servants of God in 
Old Testament times, and therefore they did not suffice — at 
least to those who were Gnostically inclined — to advance him 
beyond the rank of a minister or delegate of the divine will. 
The really novel effects of the gospel, to which no works per- 
formed by prophets and other servants of God could be 
compared, were its great moral and spiritual effects ; and from 
the synoptic narratives it appeared as if few or none such had 
been produced by Jesus during his lifetime. The nearest 
approach to such effects was the absorbing devotion to his 
person with which he inspired his followers. Out of that 
devotion there was yet much to come ; but, except in a few 
cases, such as that of those from whom he cast out devils, 
which is hardly a case in point ; or that of Zacchaeus, which 
is a doubtful case, seeing the great moral change in him had 
taken place before his encounter with Jesus (Luke xix. 8); or 
that of the woman who was a sinner — very little of this kind is 
distinctly apparent in the synoptic records. Indeed, if we 
think of it, there was little room or opportunity for the 
manifestation of such effects during the lifetime of Jesus amid 
Jewish society, where the legal outward and conventional forms 
of religion were in general so strictly observed. It was only 
when the gospel moved forward into the festering mass and 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 39 

undisguised corruption of heathen lands that the grand moral 
miracle — the astounding spiritual power of the gospel — became 
apparent. This unexampled phenomenon, which was palpable 
and present, so engrossed the attention of St. Paul that he 
makes no allusion to physical miracles by Jesus and his 
followers. The signs and wonders to which he refers in his 
epistles as wrought by himself were probably, or almost cer- 
tainly, the spiritual effects of his preaching of the gospel. It is 
not impossible indeed that examples of moral therapeutic may 
have accompanied his ministry as they did that of Jesus, not to 
speak of that curious and inexplicable phenomenon of the gift 
of tongues, which, in a travestied form, has been repeated and 
exploded in modern times. But such effects as the sudden 
conversion and spiritual renovation, in large numbers at a time, 
of men steeped in superstition and in habits of vice, were 
certainly regarded by him as a greater thing than any merely 
physical miracle, and were probably the signs and wonders of 
which he speaks as done by himself (Rom. xv. 19, 2 Cor. 
xii. 12). He expressly points to his converts as his "work in 
the Lord" and the seal of his apostleship (1 Cor. ix. 1, 2). In 
all probability the circumstance that the traditional accounts of 
the life of Jesus contained so few illustrations of this surpassing 
miracle was one reason why the Apostle takes so little notice of 
these traditions in his epistles. The same grand spiritual phe- 
nomenon was what imposed upon the imagination of the 
fourth Evangelist as it must have done upon all believers in the 
first ages of the Church, and he saw the explanation of it by 
regarding Christ as the light and life of men, and in his 
increasing exercise of these pre-eminent functions of the Logos. 
In comparison with this phenomenon, the works of healing 
and the other visible and physical miracles ascribed to Jesus in 
the tradition sank for the Evangelist into insignificance — not, 
however, that he undervalued, far less ignored, the miraculous 
element or lost sight of its value. While he grounds the 
divine sonship of Christ on the testimony of Christ himself he 
does not forget that that testimony seemed to derive its 
sanction and authority, in part at least, from his command and 
exercise of miraculous powers. And therefore the Evangelist 
seeks to make these to yield as much as they can towards the 
exaltation of him who wrought them. He does not indeed 
represent Jesus as at any time exercising his miraculous powers 



54-0 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

in the somewhat indiscriminate manner of the synoptic records, 
but by the circumstantiality of the few select miracles which he 
represents Jesus as performing, he impresses the reader with the 
idea that they are more striking and more wonderful than those 
recorded by the synoptists. He also magnifies their import- 
ance, as in the case of the man who was born blind (ch. ix.), 
by saying that the man was thus born in order that the works 
of God should be made manifest in him, i.e., that the miracle 
should be performed on him ; and in the case of Lazarus, by 
saying that the sickness had overtaken him in order that the 
Son of God might be glorified thereby, i.e., by the miracle of 
his resuscitation. In one respect indeed this miracle at Bethany 
affords the most striking illustration of what we are here saying. 
On the apologetic side it has been maintained that this was not 
a greater miracle than that of the raising of the daughter of 
Jairus from the bed of death, or than that of the raising of the 
widow of Nain's son from the bier, as reported in the synoptists. 
And from a modern or scientific point of view this may be 
justly said. But to the men of that day it must have appeared 
to be a greater miracle; the superlative, as it has been desig- 
nated, of which these others were the positive and comparative. 
For it was at that time a current superstition that the dis- 
embodied spirit hovers about the place of sepulture for three 
days before taking its flight to far-off regions from which it 
cannot return. To recall a spirit from that distance seemed to 
be an enhancement of the miracle of resuscitation, and hence 
the emphasis with which it is said that Lazarus had been dead 
four days. 

This, however, only by the way. The enhancement of the 
miracles was only a subordinate object with the Evangelist. 
His chief aim in depicting Jesus as a wonder-worker was to give 
prominence to the symbolical character which he saw that 
physical miracles, treated as he treated them, were capable of 
sustaining. For him, as for St. Paul, they were comparatively 
insignificant, of little or of no intrinsic importance ; or, if they 
did retain their value for him, it was only because he could 
discern in them the capability of serving as symbols of the 
permanent, ever-present, outstanding fact of the great moral 
miracles which the spirit of Christ was still working in the 
Church. And just because he viewed the miracles chiefly, if 
not exclusively, under this aspect of symbols, we conceive that 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 54 I 

the physical miracles lost for him the solidity, the reality of 
facts. The symbol has no independent existence of its own ; it 
is nothing in itself ; it is shaped and moulded to the thing- 
symbolized — a creature and plaything of the imagination. And 
thus the miraculous element became fluid and plastic under the 
hand of the great idealist ; a material to be shaped at will to 
represent the strange phenomenon, which alone riveted his mind 
and fired his imagination. He felt himself relieved from the 
obligation of fidelity to the mere external facts, and he availed 
himself to the utmost of the historical license, which seemed 
thus to be given to him, for the construction of a new Gospel, 
whose aim was, not to reproduce or rearrange the actual facts of 
the life of Jesus, but to symbolize and foreshadow his post- 
humous agency, or, in other words, the moral and spiritual 
effects of the Gospel. 

The miracles recorded by this Evangelist seem to serve 
merely as pegs or hinges to the discourses which are founded 
upon them for the purpose of pointing out their symbolical 
character. They exhibit an intentionalism which is quite foreign 
to those in the other Gospels. These latter are generally, or all 
but invariably, works of mercy and beneficence, called forth to 
relieve distress, or to meet some emergency ; whereas those 
others have all the appearance of being performed for the express 
purpose of presenting an occasion, or furnishing a text for dis- 
courses, which in the other Gospels flow naturally and simply 
from the desire to impart instruction. And we may also recall 
here the observation already made that the purpose of these 
discourses is not, as in the synoptists, to set forth the kingdom 
of God and the conditions of obtaining an entrance into it, but 
to assert the divine sonship of Jesus. He is here no longer the 
mere teacher, as he is there, but the subject and text of his own 
teaching. He no longer says that men must enter the kingdom 
of heaven through self-denial and much tribulation, but through 
faith in himself as the Son of God. It may be true that the 
two forms of doctrine admit of being reconciled by means of 
certain well-worn explanations ; but the style of language, the 
form of doctrine, and the presuppositions of each belong to 
different individuals. The original doctrine has taken a different 
hue, by being passed through another mind. It is the Evan- 
gelist, not Jesus, who speaks in the fourth Gospel; and he shows 
his consciousness of this, and justifies his new version of the 



542 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

teaching of Jesus by those words, already quoted, which he 
attributes to him (xvi. 12-14) : "I have yet many things to say 
unto you ; but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when he, the 
Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth," etc. 
The Evangelist is so possessed by his hyper-Pauline Christology 
that he does not shrink from constituting himself the mouthpiece 
of Jesus, and advancing it in his name. Christ is the " truth," 
and whatever recommends itself as truth to the mind of the 
Evangelist, he does not hesitate to represent as proceeding from 
him or from his Spirit. 

Of the seven miracles which the Evangelist attributes to Jesus 
two, or, at the most, three are adopted by him from the synoptic 
records ; the rest are, we believe, the offspring of his own 
imagination. But the symbolical intention, which is altogether 
unobserved or overlooked in the synoptic narratives of the 
miracles, is apparent here, and prominent on the surface in all 
the seven. And of the three most striking of these, the Evan- 
gelist represents Jesus as drawing out the symbolical aspect, and 
impressing it in long discourses on the multitudes who witnessed 
them. It was in these discourses especially, though not exclu- 
sively, that the Evangelist had the opportunity of representing 
Jesus as bearing testimony to himself, and of obtaining his 
authority and sanction for regarding him as the Logos, the life 
and the light of men (see especially chapters ix. and xi.). 
This self-testimony of Jesus supplied that authority which 
was wanting to the Pauline dogma, and which, if only 
authenticated as his to the judgment of believers, was sufficient 
to settle the Gnostic question by placing him on an unap- 
proachable pinnacle. 

A great part of the fourth Gospel is devoted to the narration 
of these miracles, with the discourses founded on them. Inter- 
spersed are various episodes, such as those of the conversations 
of Jesus with Nathaniel, with Nicodemus, and the woman of 
Samaria ; the story of the Greeks who desired to see Jesus, 
and his disputations with the Jews with respect to the Sabbath, 
and his claim to be the Son of God ; all bearing, more or less 
unequivocally, on Christ himself as the life and light of men, 
and on the Evangelist's variant of the Pauline dogma ; and all 
lending confirmation to the general theme. These, the new 
materials of the Gospel, are enclosed in a framework generally 
similar to that which is common to the synoptic Gospels ; 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 543 

though even here the Evangelist has by no means adhered 
closely to the synoptic outline, and, in some important points, 
to which we shall yet call attention, he deviates widely from it. 
His omissions, too, are significant, because they show that his 
design was, as far as possible, to keep out of sight whatever 
might seem to be incongruous with the Logos-nature, or might 
disturb the dramatic unity of impression. Such are the absence 
of any allusion to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, to 
his agony in the garden, and to his exhibition of human frailty 
on the cross. The references to his family relationship are of 
the most casual kind, and his advent into the world is described 
as the shining of a light into the darkness, as if the Evangelist 
was not able to conceive how the Logos did not " despise the 
virgin's womb." 

After all that can be said upon the subject, it will ever 
remain a difficulty for the modern mind to understand how a 
man of deep religious instinct, as the Evangelist obviously is, 
could take such liberty as we imagine him to have done, with 
a history of such supreme moment. There are other sug- 
gestions besides those which we have already thrown out, that 
may help towards an explanation. We may say that the senti- 
ment of utter devotion to the memory of Christ which had 
sunk deep into his mind, and had melted into one with his God- 
consciousness, may have been regarded by him as the breathing 
or witness of the spirit of Christ in him. In representing 
Christ, therefore, as testifying during his lifetime, by word and 
deed, to his own divine sonship, the Evangelist may have 
regarded this testimony as but the articulation of that spiritual 
witness; or as the setting of it forth in outward and historical 
form, by way of accommodation to the sensuous or popular 
understanding. It is conceivable that a devout idealist might 
think such a procedure to be perfectly legitimate. Or, yet 
again, the Evangelist may have seen that the high ideal pre- 
sented in the life and person of Jesus was the most precious 
possession of humanity, the best guarantee for all spiritual 
progress ; and that the impersonation of that ideal in Christ 
offered the best means of keeping it as a visible and living 
canon before the eye of man ; and he may have felt himself 
called upon to remodel the Gospel narrative, to make it a more 
perfect vehicle for that purpose. For, if it be objected that 
Christ was already presented as such a visible and living canon 



544 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

in the synoptic Gospels and in the Pauline dogma, the Evan- 
gelist may yet have felt that in neither the one nor the other 
was he invested with that mystical and transcendent character 
which was best fitted to take hold of the human mind, and to 
give boundless play to the devout imagination. He may have 
thought to give a higher pitch to the ideal by identifying the 
personal canon with the Logos. And this idea, being laid 
down as a theme and basis, necessarily communicated a com- 
pletely new and idealistic character to the pragmatic and 
historical elements of his Gospel. But if none of these sug- 
gestions are quite satisfactory, we have no alternative but to 
fall back on the hypothesis that the Evangelist, being possessed 
by an absolute conviction of his Christological view, thought 
himself at liberty to adopt the only means by which he could 
hope to impress the Church at large with the same conviction, 
and that he can hardly be acquitted of acting upon the maxim 
that the end justifies the means. All such suggestions are 
made under reservation of the remarks that genius like that of 
the Evangelist does not act by rule, but is guided many times 
by principles of which it may not be conscious : and that a man 
of genius may be, and often is, so completely possessed by an 
idea as to become oblivious of the finer considerations of right 
and wrong. 

It is a noticeable fact, not without significance, that in all 
the testimony which Jesus bears to himself in the fourth Gospel 
he nowhere styles himself the Logos or the Word. That was 
the theme which was to be proved by his own testimony, or it 
was the key which the Evangelist put into the hands of his 
readers for their proper understanding of his Gospel. It gave 
them from the outset and at once to understand that a more 
absolute significance was to be claimed for the person of Jesus 
than had yet been claimed for him. It showed that he came 
not merely to reveal the Heavenly Father and the method of 
salvation, but also to bear testimony to himself as identical with 
the religious principle in men, or with that divine energy which 
stirs within the soul of the believer. The nearest approach to 
such a view of his nature and function in the synoptic Gospels 
is to be found in Matthew xi. 28, where Jesus is represented as 
saying, " Come unto me, and I will give you rest." But there 
the blessedness of which he speaks is in the shape of a boon 
which he bestows, a gift which is not himself. A still nearer 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 545 

approach to it occurs frequently in St. Paul's epistles, as, e.g. } 
where the Apostle says that Christ is made unto us complete 
redemption, and that the new life of which he is the author is the 
living of Christ in us ; or that that life is imparted to us by our 
being engrafted upon his life. But all such forms of expression 
admit more or less of being interpreted as figures of speech to 
represent the intimate sympathy and fellowship between Christ 
and believers. According to the fourth Evangelist again, the 
identification of the spiritual life in believers with the life of 
Christ is meant literally, if mystically, and forms the very theme 
and nerve of his Gospel, and imparts a new aspect to the 
soteriological process. In the synoptic Gospels Jesus points 
out the way to the better life ; but in the fourth Gospel he 
declares that he himself, he in person, is the way. Instead of 
saying that he shows the way and declares the truth, and 
manifests the life, he says, " I am the way, the truth and the 
life." It is made to appear to the readers of the Gospel that 
the Logos has united himself to humanity in the person of 
Christ, and, by receiving believers into his fellowship, he effects 
the same union of divine and human nature in them. The 
inward process of the spiritual life in believers is thus made to 
depend upon the mystical transfusion of his life into theirs: and 
it has been truly observed that the subject of the fourth Gospel 
is not the death of Christ and its efficacy for forgiveness, as in 
St. Paul's epistles ; but the person of Christ himself, " What he 
is, is the main thing," and they who receive him for what he is 
are thereby made partakers of his salvation, and inoculated, as 
it were, with the divine principle which is in him. Here is a 
point at which two extremes seem to meet in this Gospel. 
The apparent spirituality of its mysticism runs into a species of 
materialism, just as is the case in the Pauline doctrine. Here 
indeed is one of those deeper-lying affinities between the 
" Johannine" and Pauline doctrines. The fourth Evangelist 
might say with truth that he had written his Gospel, " not to 
destroy, but to fulfil" St. Paul's doctrine. The two doctrines 
are but one, under different aspects ; and, however much they 
may differ, they agree in this, that they transform the purely 
spiritual autosoteric doctrine of Jesus into a heterosoteric, 
somewhat materialistic, doctrine. 

If the fourth Evangelist never represents Jesus as claiming to 
be the Logos, he represents him (viii. 12) as claiming to be the 

2 M 



546 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

" light of the world," which is the next thing to it, and this also 
deserves attention. Few can have read the Sermon on the 
Mount, where Jesus says to his disciples, " Ye are the light of 
the world" (Matth. v. 14), without a feeling of the incongruity of 
such an address to the time and situation. For, even admitting 
the apologetic position that in the spirit of prophetic prescience 
Jesus might foresee the great part which his disciples were to 
play in the world, what were they themselves to make of such 
language addressed to them in the very beginning of their 
discipleship ? What effect could it have but to bewilder them, 
or to puff them up with a spirit of conceit and self-conscious- 
ness, fatal to all genuine growth and discipline. The words in 
the mouth of Jesus at that time are inconceivable. But it is 
easy to understand how, in a short time after the resurrection, 
when the Church had become alive to the fact that the gospel 
was a new power in the world, the mythicist who dramatized 
the thought that was stirring in the mind of the Church might 
put these words into the mouth of Jesus as a forecast of what 
was to be. The words expressed a fact with regard to the 
Church already patent and obvious. But behind that fact there 
was the other fact that Jesus was the source of all that light 
from which the Church derived hers. Yet, in the face of the 
general and well preserved tradition that Jesus had been simply 
a teacher of righteousness, and had not discoursed of himself, 
the mythicist could not put that ultimate fact into his mouth. 
To do this was reserved for the fourth Evangelist. The Logos- 
idea, with which this Evangelist started, necessitated the adop- 
tion of a self-referent style of speech on the part of Jesus, and 
as a matter of course the ideal Christ was made to utter the 
assertion that he himself, and he alone, was the light of the 
world. The one form of words was true in a sense as well as 
the other. But the point of view is different, and the same 
teacher could hardly have adopted both. 

The result to which we would conduct the reader is, that the 
Evangelist proposed to write not a matter-of-fact account of 
the life of Jesus as seen by the corporal eye, or observed by the 
ordinary intelligence, for he knew, or believed, that such an 
account had already been given by the synoptists ; but such an 
account as would convey to the Church the impression which, 
under the transfiguring light and inspiration of faith and love, 
it had made upon himself, as a life of God moving upon earth 









THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 547 

in human form, as of the other self of God — the Logos, the life 
and the light of men. He had no evidence before him, no 
tradition that Jesus had ever summoned the man of Bethany 
from the grave ; but he was firmly persuaded that Jesus, in 
virtue of his divine nature as the Logos, might have done this 
or any other miracle had he chosen to do it, and to impress a 
conviction of the same kind upon his readers the Evangelist 
did not hesitate to represent Jesus as exercising his miraculous 
power in this particular instance. The synoptists had, it is 
true, placed on record two occasions on which Jesus had resus- 
citated the dead, and the Evangelist might have economized 
invention and made use of one of these occasions to represent 
Jesus as claiming to be the resurrection and the life ; but the 
environing circumstances in these other cases were not adapted 
to his design, and he preferred to create a new scene and a new 
situation to give a more free and effective play to his imagin- 
ation, and to impress the lesson which he meant to teach by a 
more life-like drama. While these other acts of power might 
show that Jesus had come as a delegate from God, this miracle 
at Bethany was so arranged as to call forth a testimony 
respecting himself as more than a delegate, as allied by nature 
to God ; and for the express purpose of manifesting His glory. 
The impression which the life of Jesus had made upon the 
mind of the Evangelist was absolute truth to himself, and he 
had become possessed with an irresistible impulse to inculcate the 
same truth upon the mind of the Church. The literary means 
employed by him for this purpose, though not according to the 
scrupulous notions of modern times, were not unfamiliar to the 
practice of the ancient world. Witness the practice of the 
great historians of antiquity of putting speeches into the 
mouths of their leading characters, to give to their own views of 
the situation the sanction of the principal actors ; and witness 
also the wide extension of pseudonymous and apocryphal 
literature in the ancient world, to promote ends which seemed 
desirable to the writers themselves, or to throw into circulation 
among their contemporaries their own opinions and judgments 
of passing or past events. • 

From what has now been said it will be seen that we regard 
the fourth Gospel, as designed by its author to set forth Jesus 
as the Logos, and to establish or vindicate Pauline or dogmatic 
Christianity chiefly by the testimony which he represents Christ 



548 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

as bearing to himself. The object of the Gospel is not to place 
on record a narrative of events as they occurred, or as the 
writer believed them to have actually occurred, but to dramatize 
in the form of a historical narrative the eternal nature and 
spiritual truth of Christianity. It is perhaps too much to sup- 
pose that he may, however darkly and dimly, have caught sight 
of the philosophic doctrine, that the true power which moulds 
human life resides in the idea ; that events are nothing except 
in so far as they are manifestations of the idea, and that any 
history, real or unreal, which conveys the idea to the mind, has 
a truth and a value of its own. But we can well imagine that 
neither the synoptic Gospels, with which the Evangelist was 
perfectly familiar, nor the authority of St. Paul, seemed to him 
to supply a satisfactory basis for Pauline theology : and yet less 
for that Christology, to which — partly on speculative, partly on 
controversial grounds, and partly on his own experience and 
observation of the marvellous effects of Christianity- — he himself 
had risen. It had become apparent to him that such a basis 
could only be supplied by the declaration or testimony of Christ 
himself; for which place could be found only in a new version 
of the Gospel history. As he proceeded to the composition of 
such a Gospel he would perceive that such a revision must be 
radical, and that many deviations from the synoptic versions 
which were helpful and auxiliary to his main design besides 
those which were more essential to it, would be requisite. And 
we conceive of the Evangelist as a consummate artist, even- 
stroke of whose pencil contributes to the oneness of the effect 
of his picture ; we should even hesitate to say that his Gospel 
could have differed materially from what it is, even in sub- 
ordinate details, without loss to its presiding thought. Apart 
from one or two interpolations and the twenty-first chapter, 
which is probably added by another hand, the Gospel is, unlike 
the Apocalypse — -a work of one casting, a web of one piece — 
organically unified by the artistic, and therefore not too obtru- 
sive bearing of all its parts on the Logos-idea, for which, to use 
an expression of its own as remarked by Holzmann, it forms 
the " seamless " vestment. 

This theory of the design and origin of the Gospel recom- 
mends itself to our judgment, because it explains the surprising 
incongruities or contradictions in details between it and the 
earlier Gospels. These will ever remain irreducible, however 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 549 

much apologetic theologians may endeavour, by the utmost 
extravagance of conjectural ingenuity, to minimize or explain 
them away. Instead of attempting anything in this direction, 
we find an explanation at every point of these discrepancies, by 
regarding the Gospel not as a historical document, but as the 
imaginative vehicle of the Evangelist's Christological concep- 
tion. 

The salient peculiarity in this Gospel, which produces a sense 
of its fundamental and irreconcilable difference from the other 
Gospels, is its representation of Christ as uttering long discourses, 
which stamp with his authority those dogmatic views concerning 
himself which only came up after his death. Instead of being- 
utterances of his God-consciousness, as in the synoptists, these 
discourses are utterances of his self-consciousness, as the Son of 
God ; and instead of directing attention to practical religion, 
they direct attention mainly to himself as the object of faith 
and devotional sentiment. A purely dogmatic, personal, and 
self-referent complexion is thus given to the teachings of Jesus, 
of which there is hardly a trace in the more historical synoptic 
records. We have already observed that the Evangelist betrays 
his sense of the awkwardness of this self-testimony, by his 
endeavour to show that the objection to such a partial 
testimony does not apply in the case of Jesus. He expected 
that, in spite of the suspicion attaching to a man's professions 
respecting himself, those by Jesus, as reported by him, would 
receive credence from his readers. For, it will be observed, 
that his Gospel is evidently addressed to those who already 
believed with unbounded faith in Jesus, and were prepared 
to believe whatever Jesus might say regarding himself, provided 
the reporter was a credible ear-witness ; and the consummate 
art of the Evangelist gained its highest triumph, as we shall 
yet see, in conveying that impression to his readers. 

Another irreconcilable incongruity between the fourth and the 
first three Gospels may be seen in the entire absence in the 
former of all growth in the consciousness of Jesus ; and this 
also may be readily accounted for by its design to bring all the 
details of the life into harmony with the Logos-idea. In the 
synoptic Gospels there are various indications that the Messianic- 
consciousness of Jesus unfolded itself gradually and grew 
clearer to his mind; and also that his Messianic character was a 
late disclosure to his disciples. Everyone must feel that these 



5 50 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

indications, undesigned and unobtrusive as they are, lend an 
air of historic reality to these records. But in the fourth Gos- 
pel this note of genuine history is altogether lost or discarded. 
That Gospel shows no gradation either in the consciousness of 
Jesus himself or in the faith of the disciples. He unveils his 
true character from the very first, and is recognized for what he 
is by Nathaniel, John the Baptist, and others ; and his relations 
friendly or hostile, with those around him, remain the same 
from first to last. At the very commencement he drives the 
money-changers from the temple, and provokes hostility before 
he has made any attempt to instruct or conciliate. This 
timing of the event may be in full accord with his character as 
the Logos. But, assuredly, there is in it, according to all 
ordinary standards of conduct, less of decorum than in the 
incident as recorded in the synoptic Gospels, which place it 
towards the end of his ministry, after he had tried and 
exhausted every method of conciliation without effect. 

Indeed the entire exclusion of growth or gradation in the 
consciousness of Jesus is involved in the Evangelist's con- 
ception of his nature. Nay, the Evangelist feels it to be so 
important and so essential that he takes care that it should not 
be overlooked by the readers of his Gospel. In the sixth 
chapter he says, " For Jesus knew from the beginning who they 
were that believed not, and who should betray him." He feels 
it necessary, by such a statement, to forestall, and by forestall- 
ing to obviate the suspicion that, in selecting Judas as one of 
his disciples, Jesus had mistaken the character of the man, or 
did not foresee what was to come of it. According to the 
Evangelist Jesus foresaw all, and did not commit himself to 
Judas and to others who seemed to believe in him, though he 
allowed them to swell his train. Knowing the treacherous 
nature of Judas, and that he had a devil in him, Jesus yet 
chooses him to be one of his most intimate associates, that by 
this means a hidden and mysterious purpose, which afterwards 
comes to light, may be accomplished. By this pragmatic con- 
struction, the Evangelist raises Jesus so high above human 
ignorance and infirmity as to merge his humanity in his 
divinity, and to land himself in a view of his nature, which can 
hardly be regarded as else than docetic. 

The theory of the origin of the Gospel which we advocate 
throws light not only upon its more general peculiarities, of 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 55 I 

which we have now singled out two, but also upon man)- of 
its separate incidents and details. Let us take the miracle at 
Bethany as an example. This miracle is found only in the 
fourth Gospel, and, apart altogether from the general objection 
to all miracle, we see many- grounds for holding this one to 
be altogether unhistorical. In the first place, to any one 
who will candidly compare the parable of the rich man and 
Lazarus, in the Gospel of St. Luke, it will be apparent that 
the narrative of the miracle is founded upon the parable, 
and has been suggested by it. In the latter, Abraham is 
represented as saying of the rich man's relatives, " Neither 
will they believe, though one rose from the dead," which 
words it was the object of the Evangelist to illustrate by 
his narrative of the raising of Lazarus. For, from the sequel, 
it appears that the miracle, so far from awakening belief 
in the great mass of the Jewish people, was the more im- 
mediate incentive to their crucifixion of the wonder-worker, 
and furnished a proof of their invincible hostility to the 
Prince of Life. The Evangelist thus contrives to discredit, 
and to break down, the spirit of scepticism with which this 
narrative, or his Gospel in general, might be regarded, by 
suggesting that that spirit was so virulent that it would 
not believe even though it saw. 

In contrast to such a spirit, the Evangelist manifests an 
evident anxiety to attach peculiar merit to those who believe 
without having seen the risen Saviour (xx. 29). The incident 
of Thomas' scepticism seems to be introduced in order to 
impress this idea on his readers. While, in the synoptic 
Gospels, Thomas is mentioned only by name in the list of 
the apostles, and, like the majority of his colleagues, is quite 
inconspicuous ; he is, in the fourth Gospel, singled out and 
brought into prominence as the representative of doubting and 
hesitating believers, of whom there may have been many in 
the early days of the Church, and to afford occasion for the 
remark of Jesus, that it was a high merit to stifle doubt, 
and to believe in him on slender evidence, or even in the 
absence of any evidence beyond his own word of asseveration 
(compare John iv. 41 and xvii. 21). A doctrine of this kind 
was well calculated, as by a sort of moral compulsion, to 
carry a soul over whatever doubts might possess it, not only 
as to the fact of the resurrection itself, but also as to the 



5 5 2 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

historical value generally of the new version of the life of 
Jesus. 

Among the dramatis personae of the Gospel there were 
those who saw and believed not. These are classed by the 
Evangelist as " Jews " (xx. 1 9 and passim). There were 
those again who believed because they had seen the Christ. 
These were his personal disciples, including Thomas. But 
who are they who believed without having seen ? Evidently 
not those of that company, but those who joined the band 
of the disciples after Jesus had ceased to be an object of 
sight ; and the mention of these is an indication, however 
slight, that the words were not spoken by Jesus, but are the 
words of the Evangelist himself, put by him into the mouth 
of Jesus, and written at a time when all who joined the Church 
had only the testimony of the personal disciples to rely upon ; 
and it is implied in xx. 29, that while these were excluded 
from the privilege of seeing the risen Christ, their belief in 
him was all the more blissful and meritorious. 

Apologists have endeavoured to raise a presumption in 
favour of the historical value of the raising of Lazarus by 
claiming that it affords an explanation at once of the transient 
enthusiasm of the populace, and of the deadly rage of the 
Rulers, which led to the crucifixion, better and more intelligible 
than can be gathered from the current of events in the 
synoptic version of them. Now, it is perhaps, though hardly, 
credible, that the fury of the Rulers might only be exas- 
perated by the proof he had afforded of his being the Lord 
and Giver of Life, and by the danger in which their authority 
was thus placed. But it is not easy to see how the multitude 
could so soon have forgotten such a miracle. Putting this 
consideration out of sight, however, we say that the explana- 
tion of the catastrophe thus given is only too vivid and too 
dramatic for the pragmatism of real history. All is sufficiently 
explained without this miracle by the simple fact to which the 
synoptists confine themselves, that Jesus had come at last to 
Jerusalem. He had often been there, no doubt, in his youth 
and early manhood, but never before, since he had begun to 
preach, and to draw upon himself the hostility of the Pharisees. 
He had purposely avoided the vicinity of the city, and had 
thus been able in the remote parts of the country to escape 
the fury of those in authority. A certain degree of incredulity, 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 53 

especially in Jerusalem, as to his claims was, we may believe 
occasioned by this circumstance. But when he was seen at 
length calmly and courageously advancing to the city to 
brave his enemies in the stronghold of their power, all doubt 
was for the moment dissipated ; his apparent confidence 
communicated itself to the people. It was believed that 
he was about to assert himself, and to erect the kingdom 
of God, which he announced (Luke xix. 11). But the en- 
thusiasm cooled as suddenly as it had been excited. When 
it was seen that he still continued his office as a mere teacher, 
that he offered no demonstration of superhuman power, 
and that nothing was to come of all that excitement, the 
crowd felt itself befooled, and was infuriated by the dis- 
appointment of its expectations, ready to be the tools of the 
Rulers, who, at the same time, had regained their confidence, 
and all that remained for Jesus was to die, with the reputation 
of an impostor and blasphemer. 

In this connection let us advert once more to the fact that 
the Evangelist places the cleansing of the temple in the very 
early period of the ministry of Jesus, whereas the synoptic 
tradition places it at the very end, when the relations between 
Jesus and the Rulers had become strained to the utmost, and 
when he had begun to give vent to his indignation at their 
desperate hostility to the truth. Now it has been generally 
felt that there is a certain indecorum in representing Jesus 
as acting thus violently at the very beginning of his ministry, 
before he had exhausted or even tried the means of persuasion 
and conciliation. But there were reasons which may have 
weighed, unconsciously it may be, with the Evangelist in 
deviating here from the synoptic tradition. The incident in 
the temple, as recorded by the synoptists, was one which 
the Evangelist could neither omit nor reproduce with the same 
setting of time and circumstance. Many incidents in the 
synoptic narratives, which were no less striking and important, 
he does omit, as, e.g., the temptation in the wilderness and the 
agony in the garden, and the cry of despair upon the cross. 
Such incidents he omitted, because he felt instinctively, as we 
feel to this day, that they would interfere, as so many disparate 
elements, with a life which was the self-manifestation of the 
Logos. But he retained this incident in the temple, because it 
seemed to harmonize with such a life, and to be a momentary 



5 54 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

revelation to his enemies of the divine power which was at 
other times latent in that humble exterior/" At the same time 
it was necessary for his general plan to remove this incident as 
far as his extended canvas would allow, from proximity and 
connection with the closing scene, in order that the attention 
of his readers might be concentrated upon the raising of 
Lazarus as the final and proximate irritant of the murderous 
design of the Rulers. To attach this consequence to the 
grandest of all the miracles of Jesus fell in with one of the 
main objects, which he keeps before him in his Gospel, viz., 
to intensify the desperate wickedness of the Jews in rejecting 
Jesus. Had the incident in the temple been the immediate 
cause and provocation of their deadly resentment, their re- 
sentment might have seemed to be natural, or even venial ; 
for the act which provoked it was done in defiance and 
contempt of the authority of the Rulers, by whom the worldly 
traffic in the sacred precincts must have been sanctioned. But 
if the Jews and their Rulers were instigated and spurred on 
to their crime by an act of power and beneficence on the 
part of Jesus, which was truly divine, the reprobate state of 
their minds was thereby placed in a light the most glaring. 
There is, as every one knows, a conspicuous and startling 
discrepancy between the first three Gospels and the fourth, in 
their chronology of the life of Jesus, and we decidedly regard 
the chronology and general outline of the history as given by 
the synoptists as more true to fact than those given by the 
latter. No valid reason can be given why the synoptists should 
have departed from the true chronology (as we have elsewhere 
shown), whereas a highly probable reason can be shown for 
such a departure on the part of the fourth Evangelist. St. 
Paul's silence with regard to the events in the life of Jesus was 
probably due in part to the fact that there was little to be said, 
few salient details — only the daily routine of his work as a 
teacher of righteousness, and the opposition which he encoun- 
tered, as may be seen in the synoptists. But this did not suit 

*The Evangelist, it may be observed, had not the same motive for 
preserving the synoptic record of the Transfiguration, though in it, too, the 
latent glory of Christ was manifested. It was a manifestation only to those 
who " were with him in the holy mount," so that the Jews and their Rulers 
were not cognizant of it, and their guilt in rejecting him was not thereby 
heightened. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 555 

the fourth Evangelist, who had to find motive and opportunity 
for discourses of a novel kind, not delivered by Jesus himself: 
in which he could turn about the Messianic and Logos-ideas on 
every side ; and for this purpose he had to protract the time of 
the public ministry from little more than one to nearly three 
years, so as to place the central figure in various new situations, 
and exhibit him in converse and contact with imaginary persons, 
unknown to the synoptic tradition. 

The most surprising deviation, however, from the synoptic 
tradition which the fourth Gospel exhibits is the transference 
of the date of the crucifixion from the 15 th to the 14th of the 
month. And this deviation will be found also to stand in 
no distant connection of dependence upon the Logos-idea and 
the general scope of the Gospel. The necessary effect of 
this great idea upon the Evangelist's mind was to heighten 
and intensify his dogmatic interest. For we may remark, 
in passing, that it is a pure misapprehension to suppose, as 
some seem to do, that because his doctrine is mystical it 
cannot also be dogmatic. But without dwelling on this, we 
say that the Logos-idea, which had taken hold of his mind, 
inclined him to find a dogmatic and symbolic significance 
in all the events of the earthly life of Jesus ; and even to 
retouch and alter these events, so as to make them pat and 
striking in their dogmatic aspect. The interest in this instance 
was to supply a historic basis to the Pauline dogma that 
Christ was the true Passover or Lamb of God : to demonstrate 
that his death on the cross came in the room of the Jewish 
Passover by alleging that it had taken place on the very day 
of the Passover, and to exalt the significance of that event 
by thus making it to appear to be not a mere fulfilment, but 
a fulfilment which was also an abolition or supersession of 
the Law. The fact of the transposition of the date we do 
not need to prove. It is acknowledged by the critics of 
highest eminence even on the apologetic side, and indeed the 
evidence of the fact is so clear, that no one could or would 
entertain a doubt of it for a moment, except for the orthodox 
interests which seem to be at stake. The manifest variation 
in the dates assigned to this event is very suggestive of the 
presumably unhistorical character of m'any of the details of 
Gospel history, and deserves all the attention which has been 
given to it by critics of every school of theology. Let it be- 



5 56 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

borne in mind that the first evidence in point of time to the 
date of the crucifixion is that which may be derived from 
what St. Paul says as to the Last Supper in I Cor. xi. In 
that reference the remarkable thing is that the Apostle does 
not in any way connect the Last Supper with the Passover. 
All he says is that it took place on the night on which Jesus 
was betrayed ; and, if the crucifixion really did take place on 
the 15th, i.e., within the period during which the festival 
lasted, and on the day to which the greatest solemnity was 
attached, the oversight or omission on the part of the Apostle 
seems not a little curious. For it was clearly in the interest 
of his doctrine of atonement to point out, allusively at least, 
this connection. His doctrine, that Christ was the true Pass- 
over, would have received a strong confirmation from the 
coincidence. Indeed the omission seems to us to afford some 
presumption, however faint, that the coincidence in point of 
time between the Passover and the crucifixion cannot have 
been so striking as it came to be afterwards represented. 
And, if we combine this presumption with the circumstance 
of the discrepancy between the synoptic and Johannine dates, 
it becomes an open question whether the crucifixion happened 
on either of these dates, and not rather on the 13th. Two 
of the synoptists make it certain that the Sanhedrim had 
formally resolved, two days before the Passover, i.e., on the 
1 2th, upon the death of Jesus ; and resolved also that the 
sentence should not be carried out during the feast, lest there 
should be an uproar of the people. To understand the signi- 
ficance of the latter part of the resolution we have to remember 
the fact that by way, we suppose, of edifying the crowds then 
assembled, and exhibiting to them the sanctions of the law, 
criminals were often reserved for execution during the Pass- 
over. The existence of such a custom rendered it necessary 
to make the express provision that, for the reason stated, it 
should not be followed in the case of Jesus. The execution 
of the sentence had in his case either to be postponed or 
to be precipitated ; and the latter alternative was clearly to be 
preferred, so that no opportunity might be given for him to 
work upon the fickle and excitable crowd during the festival. # 

* It may indeed be said that Judas, by his treachery, created an 
opportunity unexpectedly, and, as it were, forced the hands of the Sanhedrim. 
But the whole episode of Judas and the part which he played on the occa- 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 557 

Prompt action was requisite, and the likelihood is that Jesus 
was secured that very night, and executed on the 13th. For, 
if this were not the case, we should have to account for the 
fact that the Sanhedrim departed from its resolution, and 
allowed the crucifixion to take place during the Passover ; and 
also for the circumstance that tradition should have preserved 
the memory of an abortive resolution. To us this incidental 
notice of St. Mark seems to be a fragment of genuine history, 
and remains to throw doubt upon the mythical date which 
may have crept in at a later period. The circumstance that 
the two days before the Passover are represented as being 
filled with other incidents is of no consequence. The mythical 
fancy could easily provide for this by the re-arrangement of 
existing materials ; and other data seem to render it probable 
that the mythical fancy was particularly busy with the events 
of this period, as indeed is antecedently likely. But upon 
these we do not enter. Suffice to say that the 13th of the 
month did not satisfy the dogmatic or mythical tendency, 
which required that the facts of history at that critical con- 
juncture should be adapted to preconceived ideas. There must 
have existed in Jewish-Christian quarters a strong disposition 
to represent Jesus as having on this occasion given countenance 
by his presence to the great legal festival ; and besides this, 

sion is rendered doubtful by many circumstances, and especially by the fact 
that St. Paul seems to have been ignorant of it (1 Cor. xv. 5), where it is 
said that, after Christ rose from the dead, he " was seen of Cephas, then of 
the Twelve." Besides, it is difficult to understand how the action of the 
Sanhedrim could have been in any respect determined or precipitated by 
the treachery of Judas. We know, otherwise than by the testimony of the 
fourth Evangelist, that Jesus "showed himself openly to the world." His 
movements, we may be sure, were watched ; his times of going and coming 
to Jerusalem ; the route which he followed morning and evening, and the 
periods of the day or night, at which he and his disciples were left alone by 
the multitude, were well known. The Sanhedrim could not but know the 
opportunities for seizing him without creating a tumult. Or, if they did not, 
but were indebted for this knowledge to an accidental informant, they must 
have been singularly negligent in procuring the intelligence necessary for 
their design. Under all the circumstances, an offer on the part of a disciple 
to betray his Master was a wholly gratuitous service, for which even thirty 
pieces of silver was too high a price. The detail is probably to be explained 
by the eagerness of St. Matthew, which he elsewhere betrays, as well as 
here, to make out a correspondence between the life of Jesus and the 
language of the Old Testament (see Zechariah xi. 12). 



558 THE NATURAL HISTORY 01 

Jesus had presumably gone to Jerusalem to keep the Passover, 
and if he died on the 1 3th it was evident that his intention 
had been frustrated, and that he was thereby convicted of a 
want of that prevision which was conceived to belong to his 
Messianic character. To do away with such a stumbling- 
block to faith it was requisite that he should be held to have 
participated in the Passover on the 14th, and to have been 
crucified on the 15 th. 

To show that the early Church may have been alive to a 
consideration such as this, we have only to point again to the 
evident anxiety manifested by the fourth Evangelist (ii. 24, 
vi. 64, xiii. 11), to obviate the very natural suspicion that, 
in choosing Judas to be an apostle, Jesus-Logos was deceived, 
and did not know from the beginning that he had made choice 
of a traitor. Is it too much to conjecture that a kindred 
consideration may have made itself felt in the mythicizing 
process, and have contributed insensibly to remove the 
crucifixion from a date immediately prior to the Paschal 
feast to a date within it ? 

Be this as it may, the fourth Evangelist was not satisfied 
with the date assigned to the crucifixion by the synoptists, 
and did not hesitate to depart from it. The difficulty which 
we experience in conceiving how the Evangelist could put 
forth as genuine history a delineation of the ministry of Jesus, 
which was largely drawn from his own imagination, here 
reaches its culminating point. It is true that in that age and 
in antiquity generally, the obligation of strict fidelity to his- 
torical fact was not felt as it is in modern times ; and, that in 
any age, a man animated by an absorbing devotion to a cause 
of supreme importance to human welfare, might be tempted to 
think that the promotion of such a cause was an end which 
justified the use of means which were otherwise questionable. 
Rightly or wrongly it is generally believed that the Jesuit 
Order is able to combine such a principle in theory and in 
practice with a profound religious sentiment. We can, there- 
fore, conceive how the Evangelist, possessed by an ardent 
conviction that Christ was the Life and the Light of men, but 
not satisfied with the expression which had been given to this 
faith in the synoptic Gospels, might deem it both lawful and 
expedient to impress the same conviction on the mind of the 
Church by a version of the gospel history expressly constructed 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 59 

for that purpose, without regard to the pre-existing records, 
however authentic. We can imagine how, with such a design, 
he could put discourses into the mouth of Jesus, which were 
entirely different from those in the synoptic Gospels, and 
ascribe miracles to him, of a more striking order than any 
there reported. But how he could have ventured to alter, i.e., 
to contradict the date of the crucifixion expressly indicated in 
the Gospels, and accepted as authentic by the Church, it is 
more difficult to imagine. Here we must resort to conjecture, 
for we have no historical data to guide us in such an inquiry. 
We may, therefore, remember that at the time at which the 
fourth Gospel made its appearance, canonical authority was not 
enjoyed by any of the books of the New Testament, and that 
the statements of the previous Gospels, as to dates and other 
facts, might still be questioned, and, no doubt, often were 
questioned by Gnostic teachers ; and were, at least, not fully 
and definitively binding on the faith of the Christian community. 
It is then conceivable that some uncertainty might yet exist as 
to the date of the crucifixion, which even the existing written 
documents did not wholly dispel ; more especially would this be 
the case, if there yet lingered some faint echo of a tradition 
that the 1 3 th was formerly regarded as the true date. We 
must also take into account that the writer of this Gospel 
was an idealist of a daring and speculative imagination, to 
whom facts of any kind were of little value except as symbolical 
of the relative ideas. Absorbed in the contemplation of the 
idea, intent only on conveying spiritual truth, the Evangelist 
was careless of fact, and did not feel himself bound by his- 
torical data. Whether Jesus actually raised Lazarus from the 
tomb, or gave sight to a man born blind, or himself submitted 
to death on the 13 th or 15 th rather than on the 14th, was to 
him of no moment ; quite subordinate to the indubitable fact 
that Jesus Christ exercised the power of quickening the soul to 
a new life, and by his death superseded all sacrificial rites, and 
the dispensation to which they belonged. With the mere facts, 
therefore, he dealt with freedom, so as to mould them to his 
purpose of symbolizing and confirming, by means of them, his 
main idea ; and he even goes the length of bodying forth this 
idea in facts which were the creatures of his pure imagination ; 
his object not being to falsify the history, but rather to charge- 
it with a higher meaning than could be thought into it in its 



560 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

synoptic form. Such an attempt could only have been dreamt 
of in an age in which the historical sense was in almost total 
abeyance, and the Evangelist may have been emboldened to it 
by the presumption that the heightened dogmatic significance, 
which might be lent by this means to the death of Jesus, would 
readily suggest itself to his readers ; and to them, dominated as 
they were by that dogma, would amount to a demonstration or 
conclusive evidence of its truthfulness. 

In this connection the strangest and most unaccountable 
thing of all is, that the discrepancy between the date of the cruci- 
fixion as given by the fourth Evangelist and that given by the 
synoptists, though, as we now think, so apparent, yet for many 
ages attracted little or absolutely no attention.^ It has, indeed, 
been asserted that the discrepancy cannot have been real, and 
that the early Church must have been able, to her own 
satisfaction, to explain it as only an apparent discrepancy. But 
the fact that the Church of later ages had lost this explanation 
and let both dates stand, leads to quite another conclusion, 
viz., that from first to last the Church was blind even to the 
appearance of discrepancy, or slurred it over because she was 
confident of the substantial truth of gospel history, and so shy 
of manifesting a captious or lukewarm spirit, as to be ready to 
receive both dates in the most naive and uncritical spirit. In 
the early period of her history the Church could not afford to 
lose the tide which was flowing in her favour by engaging in a 
critical investigation of the exact facts. Nothing could have 
done more to arrest the movement than to let herself be 
involved in disputes about such, to her, apparently trivial 
matters. The discrepancy here referred to is of a piece with 
others which exist generally between the fourth and the other 
Gospels : and when we see in this instance the metamorphosis 
which the Gospel underwent in its latest stage thus passing 
under our eyes, we can the more readily believe in the first or 
mythical stage of the metamorphosis which the evangelical 
tradition underwent before it reached the form in which it was 
fixed by the synoptists. A metamorphosis which was accom- 
plished intentionally, and at a single stroke by the force of 
genius in the one case, went on unconsciously and gradually by 

* If we except the language of Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis, who 
insists that the crucifixion took place on the 14th, because otherwise the 
Gospels would appear to be at variance. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 56 I 

slow increments in the other, at the hands of a multitude who 
were as one man, and swayed by the same great ideas. 

According to the view here adopted, there were several 
stages in the metamorphic process. The starting point for 
the process was furnished by the actual facts of the life of 
Jesus, and the immediate impression made by these upon 
the minds of his disciples. These, however, have been so 
overlaid by mythical accretions that it is impossible for us 
now perfectly to recover them. The mythical, oral tradition 
of the life, was arrested in the course of its growth, and 
committed to writing by the first three Evangelists. Simul- 
taneously with the mythical growth, came the Pauline-dogmatic 
conception of Christ's person and work, which may have 
indefinitely modified and coloured the oral tradition as it 
grew, and may have been a factor in the redacting process. 
For, there is a probability that even the records underwent 
revision ; and that they settled down into their canonical 
form many years after Paul had disseminated his doctrine 
far and wide. At the same time, we may remark, that the 
comparative absence of dogmatic elements in the synoptic 
Gospels is, to our mind, a proof that we have there a substan- 
tially correct reproduction or reminiscence of the teaching 
of Jesus at least ; a reminiscence of it, as of a thing so sacred 
and apart, and also so definite, as to resist the importation 
or intermixture of alien, or even of apostolic elements ; a 
proof also that the mythicizing process went on, to a large 
extent, independently of the dogmatic process, and was but 
little used as a vehicle for Pauline teaching. The attempts 
which have been made to show the contrary are highly 
ingenious, but not very convincing. The probability is, that 
the mythicizing and redacting tendency found room to play, 
chiefly, though not entirely, in imparting a transcendental or 
miraculous character to the events, and in making them typical 
of the religious experience with which the time was rife. The 
inimitable gnomic and parabolic form of the teaching would 
go far to protect its integrity. Interpolations, if made, would 
be merely illustrative, or paraphrastic; variations of words which 
Jesus had actually spoken ; and such variations, comparatively 
few in number, might be suggested partly by the dogma, in 
its attempt to secure a foothold or warrant in the authority 
of Jesus, and partly by the novel experience made by the 

2 N 



562 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Church in apostolic and post-apostolic times of the working 
of the evangelic principle. The admitted facts of Christian 
experience would seem to warrant the anticipation of them 
in the teaching of Jesus, which may thus have been amplified 
and enriched. And lastly, after this revision of the tradition 
had run its course and come to a pause, the fourth Gospel 
made its appearance, as a reconstruction in one, both of the 
evangelic history and the Pauline dogma. For, while, as 
we have said, there is, in the synoptists, a comparative, if not 
a total absence of Christian dogma, the dogmatic or mystical 
element is, on the other hand, as conspicuous in the fourth 
Gospel as it is in St. Paul's epistles ; and it is quite obvious 
that this Gospel is the composition of a man who, thoroughly 
acquainted with the Christology of St. Paul, and taking it 
for granted, has yet risen upon it as a stepping stone to 
another and higher Christology of his own. For the truth 
of this Christology he provides a warrant in a revised edition 
of gospel history, of which St. Paul knew nothing. It 
was thus made to appear, that this " great doctrinal gospel 
had been reserved to meet a later need of the Church, after 
men had been toned anew by the morality, and, above all, 
by the life of Jesus " ; or, in the language of the Gospel itself, 
that the better wine had been kept until men had well drunk 
of the inferior wine of the new vintage. 

For this, it appears to us, comes near to the real significance 
of the miracle at Cana of Galilee. In ancient and in modern 
times commentators have found in this miracle, a symbol of 
the novelty and of the renovating influence of Christianity 
which had come in place of the pithless elements of Judaism. 
But, without excluding such reference, it seems to us that, in 
this narrative, the Evangelist glances at the fact, notorious 
to all at the time, of the late publication of this Gospel, and of 
its late addition to the treasury of evangelical literature. He 
endeavours covertly to forestall or remove the suspicions to 
which this fact might give rise, by hinting that in this, as 
in other respects, the Gospel reverses or overturns the natural 
order of things. The miracle consisted in converting the 
water into wine, but the master of the feast knew nothing of 
the miracle, and only expresses his surprise that the wine 
served up at the end of the feast, being better than the wine 
already drunk, should, contrary to what was usual, have been 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 563 

kept " until now." These things are plainly an allegory. The 
wine first drunk was the synoptic version of Gospel history. 
The better wine that came last was the fourth Gospel. The 
former had not fully supplied the want of the Church. The wine 
which was " wanted " to supply the needs of the company had 
not been provided in time, because the " hour " for it was " not 
yet come " ; but, unknown to the master of the feast, it had 
been provided in secret, and, when " set forth," had taken him 
by surprise. The narrative of this beginning of miracles is 
plainly a parable or allegory designed to answer beforehand 
any doubts to which the late appearance of the Gospel might 
give rise. The suggestion meant to be conveyed by the parable, 
that the Gospel had been reserved or " kept " for the later need 
of the Church, and only set forth when the need arose, was not 
the true account of it, though necessary to its reception. The 
simple truth concerning it was, that the need which had arisen 
to satisfy the Christian consciousness, or to smite down the 
prevailing Gnosticism, had called the Gospel into existence. 

When not dominated by an apologetic spirit, historical 
criticism has been unable to assign for the publication of 
the fourth Gospel an earlier date than 120 or 130 A.D., and 
the difficulty is to conceive how a work, so remarkable in 
itself, presenting points of so much difference from the other 
records of the life of Jesus, and these so significant in their 
doctrinal bearings should, if it were of apostolic origin, have 
remained for so long in total or even comparative obscurity ; 
or how, on the other hand, if not adequately authenticated as 
apostolic, it could, at so late a date, have been accepted as such. 
Into this deeply interesting, but difficult inquiry, we shall not 
enter further than we have already done. Indeed, we shall leave 
the former alternative out of consideration, and, taking for granted 
that the Gospel was post-apostolic, produced in the age or 
decade during which it was published, or obtained notoriety, 
we shall only seek to account shortly for its all but unanimous 
reception as an apostolic work. 

In the composition of his Gospel the Evangelist must have 
calculated and hoped that, notwithstanding the novelty of 
many of its materials and the lateness of its publication, 
this offspring of his genius would be received in the Church 
as a genuine record, by one of the original disciples, of the 
life of their Master. Nor is it difficult to condescend upon 



564 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

some of the grounds on which he may have based such an 
expectation. For example, it is probable that he may have 
calculated on the uncritical spirit of his fellow Christians, 
who were little curious as to the origin and authorship of 
any work which fell in with their dogmatic prepossessions 
and tended to the good of the Church, i.e., to its consolida- 
tion and unity. It was only where the tendency of a work 
seemed to lie the other way that anything like criticism 
would be brought to bear upon its authorship. An abstract, 
dispassionate interest in such a question seems to have been 
wholly unknown. Indeed, the indifference of the ancient 
world generally to all questions of historical and literary 
criticism, and its apparent inability to discriminate between 
genuine and spurious writings, are, to the modern mind, almost 
inconceivable. The illustrations of this general indifference or 
inability that have been collected by German scholars are 
truly astounding. And there is abundant evidence that the 
Church of the second century shared to the full in this 
common failing. The one or two cases which have been 
made use of to prove the contrary are quite exceptional, 
and may be said rather to prove the rule. What little 
interest the Church took in critical questions was overpowered 
by the prevalent dogmatic bias. This bias was so strong as 
to create an indisposition to look very inquisitively into the 
authorship or historical accuracy of any work which made 
for the orthodox faith and fell in with the doctrinal tend- 
encies of the age. When its contents, historical or doctrinal, 
appealed to the taste of the Church, no serious attempt was 
made to dispute its genuineness or its statement of facts, and, 
indeed, the principles of criticism were so little understood, 
and the critical apparatus was so limited, imperfect, and 
difficult of access, that a satisfactory investigation as to the 
age, authorship, and historical fidelity of a work was hardly 
possible to any, or only possible to a few ; and this circum- 
stance went far to encourage the publication of pseudonymous 
writings and of narratives more or less coloured or fanciful, as 
a means either of recommending or discrediting views that 
were current. One of the great doctors of the age (Tertullian) 
laid down the principle, " a nobis quidem nihilominus redden- 
dum est, quod pertineat ad nos," and this principle was so 
generally observed that its action might be counted upon 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 565 

by the writers of such works as we are speaking of. The 
fourth Gospel is not, there is reason to believe, the only book 
which, about the same time, gained credit in the Christian 
community under an apostolic pseudonym ; and it is not un- 
likely that the Evangelist may have been cognizant of this 
fact, and may have trusted that the same good fortune might 
befal his own work, as also, that any objections to it on the 
part of a small minority — such as were actually raised to it 
very soon by the Alogi — would be drowned in the general 
acclaim with which it would be welcomed. 

But while the Evangelist might with reason calculate upon 
the uncritical spirit both without and within the Church, he 
took care to exercise his great powers of invention in order 
to impart that air of picturesque realism to his narrative, which 
is often of itself sufficient to invest the creations of fancy 
with the repute of history. He employs consummate art in 
obviating or overcoming the prejudice against his book, which 
might be stirred by those features of it, in which his Christo- 
logical views had induced him to traverse the synoptic 
tradition. For this purpose he poses as a beloved disciple, 
who had enjoyed the most intimate confidences of his Master, 
and might be supposed to have had opportunities of informa- 
tion which none of the other disciples had enjoyed. And in 
this character he contrives to surround himself with an air 
of mystery which materially aids his design of imposing on 
the reader. The latter could hardly fail to surmise, or at 
least to have the suspicion suggested to him, that the author 
of the book is immediately or remotely identical with that 
" other disciple," who figures largely in it in company and 
in contrast with St. Peter, and that this disciple whom Jesus 
loved is the same as the St. John of the synoptists. John 
is never once mentioned by name, and the author studiously 
and meaningly keeps up his anonymity. But the veil is 
quite transparent, and there is a certain affectation and 
unreality in the seeming reserve and assumed coyness, which 
yet, however, served to stimulate curiosity and to impose 
upon the uncritical credulity of the reader. There is something 
like dexterous mystification. The Evangelist generally speaks 
of himself in the third person ; and once at least in the first ; 
at times it is left in doubt whether the beloved disciple is 
the writer, or is only the voucher for what is written by the 



566 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

Evangelist. It is impossible not to think that this is done 
intentionally to wrap the nameless authorship in mystery and 
to defeat the objections, which might be drawn from the late 
publication of the work, to its apostolic authority. It was 
gratifying to every reader to be able, as he might suppose, to 
penetrate that reserve, to unravel that open secret, and to 
attribute the Gospel to one who seemed so little anxious to 
reveal himself. He was prepossessed in favour of the Gospel 
by observing that the author did not wish to intrude himself 
into notice, to put forward a claim to be an apostle, or to 
boast of his superior acquaintance with the less known, and 
hitherto unreported, unrecorded passages in the life and 
teaching of Jesus. His apparent reserve, or his seeming 
desire to conceal his personality, might even be construed as 
having some bearing or some probable, though obscure and 
intangible, connection with the late appearance of his Gospel 
and with its mysterious origin. And to readers such as those 
were, for whom the Gospel was primarily intended, who were 
already acquainted with the synoptic Gospels, the materials 
selected from these by the Evangelist, and freely but skilfully 
adapted to his purpose, and woven into a piece with the new 
materials supplied by his invention, would seem to impart a 
life-like reality and a character of historical fidelity to these 
latter, and would even stimulate the imagination of such 
readers to the congenial task of establishing to their own 
satisfaction the pragmatic unity of the several component 
elements, synoptic and original, of the new Gospel.^ 

* Much stress is laid by Bishop Lightfoot {Biblical Essays, p. 40) on the 
circumstance that the Evangelist never once mentions the Apostle John by 
name, and he regards it as affording a presumption that the book is the 
genuine production of that Apostle. For, he says, that on the supposition of 
forgery, it was a matter of vital moment that the book should be accepted as 
the work of its pretended author. But to this curious argument there is the 
obvious objection that the Gospel is only quasi-anonymous. It is the writer's 
manifest intention to be regarded as the Apostle, and he was probably led to 
adopt a quasi-anonymity because he saw that the previous Gospels were 
really anonymous. There is nothing in these themselves to betray their 
authorship — no claim to be written by those whose names were given to them 
by the Church. The Evangelist may have felt it to be expedient not to 
depart from the example thus set. But the anonymity in his case is not 
genuine, as in the case of the other three. And he betrays an anxiety to be 
taken for the Apostle which indirectly casts suspicion upon the apostolic 
authorship which he suggests. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. $( ' >J 

Thus it may be seen that the Evangelist, in many ways, 
did all that consummate art could accomplish to secure the 
reception, by the Church, of his Gospel as a genuine record. 
And there were conditioning circumstances at the time, upon 
whose operation the Evangelist may or may not have cal- 
culated, which yet promoted his design. To some such we 
have already adverted, and need not do more here than refer 
to them. Such, for example, was the indisposition of the 
Church to question the genuineness or apostolic origin of 
any book which fell in with the current of its own thought 
and feeling, and the pressing urgency of the situation which 
made the recognition of some such book as this Gospel a 
necessity. Besides these, there has to be considered, the 
non-existence of any central authority within the Church, 
to which final appeal could be made in any case of disputed 
authorship, as well as the absence of all hostile criticism or 
censorship outside the Church ; the difficulty of tracing to 
its author any book which was circulated privately for a 
time, and passed from hand to hand ; the wide dispersion of 
the Church through the Roman empire, in any province of 
which a new book might have had its origin without the 
cognizance of it in other provinces ; and the dread upon the 
mind of individuals of incurring the reproach of a lukewarm 
or sceptical spirit if they hesitated to receive as authentic a 
book which uttered the word for thoughts astir in the Church, 
and was helpful to the development of doctrine which was 
already in process. The natural effect of such conditioning 
circumstances would be that the book would be tacitly re- 
ceived without demur and be launched upon the world as 
the genuine work of the apostle whose name, if not prefixed 
to it, was yet suggested by it from beginning to end. 

The specific feature of the fourth Gospel which, in spite 
of any misgivings to which its late and sudden appearance 
may have given rise, most of all disposed that generation to 
receive it as an authentic work of the Apostle John and a 
genuine record of the ministry of Jesus — the feature which most 
of all displayed the marvellous skill of its author, whoever 
he was, and contained the secret of its influence was, un- 
doubtedly, the fact that it met the needs of the Church all 
round and supplied a common basis or platform on which 
Pauline and Gnostic Christians could unite, so as to avert 



568 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

that fatal disruption of the Church otherwise imminent. The 
Gnostic section was satisfied and reconciled to the orthodox 
or Pauline view by its presentation of this latter in the form 
of a higher gnosis. The Paulinists were more than satisfied 
with the form, at once more precise and mystical, which it 
gave to their Christological doctrine. To a Christological 
idea which, as may be seen from the Paulinistic epistles 
and from the earlier non-canonical writings, was struggling 
ineffectually for utterance in the Church, the fourth Evangelist 
was able to give adequate expression ; and it was because 
he did this, because he gave clear expression to an idea 
towards which the mass of Christians were feeling their way, 
that his Gospel found such ready welcome in the Church. 
They did not inquire critically or sceptically into the apostolic 
authenticity of a Gospel which, dropped opportunely, as it 
seemed, into their midst as by an invisible hand, supplied 
an evidence of what to them was a supreme truth, and put 
an end to all controversy about it. The astounding indiffer- 
ence and carelessness, or, may we not say, vehemence, with 
which society, or sections of it, accept and champion as truth, 
and without examination, whatever falls in with their pre- 
conceived ideas, or passionate prepossessions ; as well as 
the difficulty of arresting the circulation of false reports, and 
establishing the true version of current events, admit of 
illustration from the history of all ages, and not least from 
the history of the present time, notwithstanding the vigilance 
of the press and the rapid communication between one 
place and another. The higher intelligence, or better in- 
formation of the few, is completely borne down by the 
weight of prejudiced, ill-informed, or interested popular opinion. 
And the application of this observation to the case now before 
us is obvious. 

The revising process to which the Evangelist has subjected 
the gospel history, besides being radical and opportune, was 
conducted with a literary skill and an imaginative power, to 
which, confessedly, none of the known Christian authors of the 
second century can lay the slightest claim ; and many critics 
have considered it to be the very height of improbability that, 
in an age so comparatively barren of literary and artistic pro- 
ductiveness, there should have lived any unknown and nameless 
individual who could have composed this Gospel. They have 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 569 

thus sought to add weight to the presumption that the author- 
ship must be referred either directly or ultimately to St. John, 
or to some other disciple who had enjoyed the benefit of divine 
guidance through personal intercourse with the Founder of our 
faith, or with some one of his immediate disciples. From what 
has been said it will be seen that we are by no means disposed 
to undervalue the marvellous character of the Gospel. But we 
cannot go the length of regarding it as a more than natural 
product of the human mind. It is not the only work whose 
execution we should have deemed impossible, except for its 
actual accomplishment. To impair the force of some of the 
considerations just referred to, which have been advanced on 
the apologetic side, it will be sufficient to name Tacitus and 
Lucian, men of great genius, whose literary activity belongs to 
the end of the first and the beginning or middle of the second 
century, comparatively barren as that period otherwise was of 
literary talent. We agree, besides, with a living writer in the 
opinion that " any one generation has just the same chance of 
producing some individual mind of first-rate calibre as any of 
its predecessors " (Ruskin). 

The freshness of the thought thrown by Christianity upon 
the world was likely to call forth literary talent in isolated 
individuals among its professors, more even than among the 
non-Christian populations ; and it is easy to believe that literary 
genius, if it did awake, might not be eager to claim credit for 
itself; might even be eager to remain in obscurity, satisfied 
simply to contribute to the victory of the cause which it had at 
heart. Of the ancient world generally we may assert that 
literary fame was not an object of its ambition to the same 
extent as it is in the modern world. An evidence of this 
indifference to such fame may be seen in the fact that the 
pseudepigraph was a form of composition so very common in 
ancient times, and that men took little or no trouble to inquire 
into the authenticity of the works which were in circulation. 
And, if we may judge from such specimens of the pseudepi- 
graph as the apocryphal book of Wisdom and the canonical 
book of Daniel, it would seem as if men of a deeply religious 
spirit had no scruple in employing their time and talents in the 
composition of such works. Like many practices and habits 
which the modern conscience condemns, this passed un- 
challenged in those ages. For conscience is a variable light ; 



570 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and no more can in general be expected of men, however 
religious, than that they should be faithful to the light which 
they have, and act up to the standard of right which prevails 
around them. The men who rise above this standard are the 
rare exceptions. And one of the startling lessons which history 
teaches, is that men whose moral sense is not highly enlightened 
may yet be deeply conscientious, and that men may be capable 
of entire fidelity and devotion to some great cause before they 
have acquired a punctilious regard to truth and justice. In an 
age which had loose notions as to the ends and objects of 
literature a man otherwise deeply moral and religious might not 
scruple to write under the disguise of a mask, and to recom- 
mend his work to the public by prefixing to it the name of 
some distinguished personage. Certain it is that a considerable 
proportion of ancient literature seems to have been apocryphal 
or pseudonymous. Not a few of our canonical books, both in 
the Old and the New Testaments, fall under this designation. 
And we regard the fourth Gospel as the most important and 
world-historical of all this species of literature. In this con- 
nection, it should not be forgotten that the writer of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, though hardly inferior in genius, is quite as 
unknown to us, even by name, as the fourth Evangelist himself. 
In assuming a disguise the Evangelist was actuated not merely 
by indifference to literary fame, but also by the fact that the 
avowal of his name as that of an unapostolic author removed 
from the events which he narrated, would have deprived his 
Gospel of that authority which was essential to the attainment 
of his object. 

Whoever was the author of the Gospel, neither his literary 
skill nor the originality of his genius can be questioned. He 
has at command an art which is above rule and defies im- 
itation. He has succeeded perfectly in his purpose, which 
was to invest the person of Christ with a mystical and 
transcendent character, fitted to take hold of the human mind, 
and to give boundless play to the devout imagination. He 
has transfigured the tradition of the life of Christ from 
first to last, without blurring its features, and contrived to 
give a realistic air to the most ideal touches of his creation. 
The mystical or speculative background which gives the 
prevailing tone to the whole conception, only serves to throw 
up into higher relief the human traits which remain. In 












THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. $7 l 

achieving this result the Evangelist gives a proof of genius 
worthy of one who bears the highest name in literature. It 
has been remarked by Lessing that the heroes of Homer 
are represented by him as beings of a higher order by their 
actions, but as true men by their feelings ; and just so is it 
with the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, divine and human nature 
being blended in him by a literary expedient of a like kind. 
In the raising of Lazarus his godlike nature is revealed, but 
his tears at the grave show him still to be very man. The 
Gospel is a unique creation, for which the elements were 
extant indeed in the concurrent or contemporaneous phases 
and tendencies of religious thought. But it was only a 
profoundly religious personality, a grandly imaginative mind, 
which could have discerned the possibilities of the situation, 
and have given organic unity to elements lying so far apart ; 
and, without startling the judgment, or awakening the sense 
of incongruity, could have combined all these elements into 
a picture of such sober yet mystical beauty, and of such im- 
posing verisimilitude; one too, so observant of all the require- 
ments of the problem. We cannot but regard it as a supreme 
stroke of genius by which he has achieved the feat, which, 
we should otherwise have deemed impossible, of combining 
" fundamentally different portraits into one stereoscopic image." 
Given the postulate of the supernatural, together with the 
Logos-idea, and that composite figure might have passed 
without challenge to the end of time. It is only in an age 
like the modern, which no longer grants that postulate, and 
no longer suffers its critical faculty to be curbed by allegiance 
to a merely speculative idea, that men have had the courage 
to face the problem, and to question whether such a com- 
bination could exist anywhere but in the realms of fancy, in 
the chambers of devout imagination, and whether, in fact, the 
portraiture of the Christ be not a creation of the same kind 
as the heroes and demigods of antiquity, though of a more 
deeply ethical and profoundly spiritual cast, and therefore 
better calculated, permanently, to enchain and sway the minds 
of men. 

The Evangelist could not indulge his speculative and ideal- 
izing tendency of thought — which is but another name for 
the impulse to reach towards the universal and absolute idea, 
without at the same time seeking to remove from Christ the 



572 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

last remaining vestiges of the limited and specifically Jewish 
character of his Messiahship or divine mission. The Evan- 
gelist saw in him, personally and visibly concentrated, the 
manifestation of God, which is otherwise so dispersed and 
diffused through all creation as to be, for most men, inap- 
preciable. Hence he assigns to him a position of absolute 
significance, independent of, and prior to, all Jewish relations, 
" Before Abraham was, I am"; and represents him as the 
divine agent in the creation of the world : as the source of 
reason and of prophecy, wherever these had existed among 
men ; and as the Light and Life which lightened every man, 
Jew or Gentile, who came into the world. By his dogma of 
the incarnated Logos, the Evangelist thus laid a speculative 
and deeper foundation for the universalism of Christianity 
than could be laid by St. Paul from his practical point of 
view. The universalism of the Evangelist rested on a specul- 
ative, i.e., a hypothetically objective basis: that of St. Paul on 
a subjective, and, therefore, precarious basis. Modern theolog- 
ians have seen this, and when they would vindicate the 
universalism of Christianity, they dwell less upon the Pauline 
doctrine of the unconditional freeness of the gospel invitation, 
than upon the grand Johannine doctrine of the Light which 
lighteth every man, and of that spirit of good which stirs 
in every bosom. The Logos-idea may be regarded simply 
as a higher gnosis which was needed to prevent the men of 
that age from indulging in the " dangerous questionings of 
the systematizing intellect," from deviating into fields of 
speculation abhorrent to the nature of Christianity and in- 
truding, beyond what was necessary for Christian faith, into 
things which they had not seen, i.e., things of which they 
knew and could know nothing from experience, or from any 
other source (see Colossians ii. 18). 

By its application to Christ, this idea invested his person 
with a surpassing and transcendent mystery, the reason why 
men of a mystical and contemplative turn of mind have in 
all ages had recourse to the fourth Gospel for satisfaction ; 
whereas the means for supplying the practical religious needs 
of men have been sought by the Church at large rather in 
the teaching of Paul. And if the corrosive action of free 
thought, and the dissolving power of the idea have not, as 
yet, been able to turn away men's minds from Christianity 






THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 57 3 

in its supernatural aspect, and from the heterosoteric doctrine, 
common both to Paul and John, it is greatly owing to the 
mystical theological haze in which the latter has wrapped 
up the whole subject, and which, while obscuring its outlines, 
has also raised it into a region which baffles thought in all 
attempts to examine it more carefully. The effect of this 
supreme gnosis seems to have been magical, for if the Gnostic 
sects did not immediately disappear before it, they at least 
very soon ceased to be a source of alarm to the Church. 

To understand how the conception of this remarkable book 
could have originated in the mind of a Christian of the second 
century, we have only to take into account the very serious 
conjuncture in the history of the Church, which synchronized 
with its appearance. The application of the current Logos- 
idea to the Christ was an opportune development, or, let us say, 
an emended edition of the Paulinistic Christology ; which, to a 
prophetic, wakeful mind, imbued with that Christology, but 
alarmed by the progress of the Gnostic heresy, was already at 
the door — an urgent necessity of the hour. The Gospel was 
but the outcome of an impulse to take a final step of doctrine, 
by which the Paulinistic, i.e. the anti-Gnostic dogma might 
acquire secure and undisputed possession of the mind of the 
Church. In working out his conception, the Evangelist repre- 
sents Jesus as advancing claims to be the Life and Light of 
men — claims never attributed to him in the synoptic tradition, 
but w r hich were readily accepted as utterances of his, because 
they so perfectly expressed, or foreshadowed, the marvellous 
experiences of the early Church ; and, being so accepted, were 
calculated ultimately, if not immediately, to arrest the Gnostic 
movement. And the miracles, which he represents Jesus as 
performing, were so manifestly symbolical of his claims, that 
they might be regarded by him as spiritually, if not literally, 
performed. And might not such representations seem to be 
lawful to the Evangelist himself, who, doubtless, expressed his 
own view of this matter in those words of his Christ : " It is 
the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing : the 
words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they arc life 
(John vi. 63). 

All along, the factor in the Christian consciousness which 
was most powerfully operant and determinant of the line of 
dogmatic development, was the tendency or craving to exalt 



574 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

and glorify the person of Christ. This tendency formed a 
point of union for the entire Christian community, however 
divergent might be the views held among them on some 
points. And now, as if satisfied that the faith once delivered 
to them admitted of no better definition than was given to 
it in the fourth Gospel, and that the Christian sentiment had 
there found its adequate expression, the great majority sought 
to intrench themselves in the position thus acquired, and to 
establish, as the rule of faith for themselves, and their suc- 
cessors in all time coming, those Scriptures which were in the 
line of this development, and had led up to this point. The 
formation of the canon and the emerging idea of the Catholic 
Church thenceforth went on together. All internal conflicts 
were decided more and more by appeal to Scriptures, which 
were thus rising to be canonical. The limits of speculation 
were drawn closer : confined, as it were, to circumscribed 
and consecrated ground. In fact, the fourth Gospel is mani- 
festly so fitted to effect these results as to afford a strong 
presumption that, had it been in existence at the earlier date 
which has been assigned to it, the Gnostic heresy might never 
have arisen to trouble the peace, or to disturb the equanimity 
of the Church. The proposition that the Catholic Church 
was founded on a compromise "between conflicting sects or 
conflicting interpretations of the Christian consciousness, re- 
ceives confirmation from the course of our remarks. The 
unity of the Christian world was preserved, first of all, by a 
compromise between the Jewish and Gentile sections of it, or, 
we may rather say, by the growth of a form of doctrine less 
antinomistic than that of St. Paul ; of a form which may be 
traced in the later or Paulinistic epistles ; and we have just seen 
that it was once again preserved by the compromise between 
Paulinism and (Gnosticism effected by the fourth Gospel, but 
a compromise which, in reality, was also a development of 
the Hellenistic elements of the Pauline doctrine. It was only 
opinions or practices which were thought to be so eccentric 
and out of harmony with the Christian consciousness as to be 
incapable of being assimilated or taken up by it, that were 
declared heretical, and the adherents of which were excluded 
from the great Christian communion. 

Before quitting our remarks on the fourth Evangelist, we 
have yet to note that as he conceived the divine energy to be 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5/5 

hypostatized in the Logos, and incarnated in Christ, so also he 
conceived of the spirit of Christ, the God-man, in its self- 
impartation to the believer, as impersonated in the Holy Spirit, 
thus laying the foundation for the metaphysical trinity of 
Catholic dogma. It appeared to him as if the sympathy 
awakened in believers with the sufferings of Christ, and the 
powerful attraction exerted on them by his manner of life, was 
the overflow of the spirit of Christ, disengaging itself from him 
and imparting itself as a personal energy to them. The idea 
thus arose of a Holy Spirit as a distinct personal entity, so as 
to constitute with the Father and the Son a triad or trinity. 
Of St. Paul it may be said that he has the germ of this 
doctrine of a personal spirit in his epistles; in which orthodox 
theologians have been able, to trace many indications of it. 
Certainly, however, he speaks of the Holy Spirit with apparent 
indecision, and, at the most, presents the orthodox doctrine in 
an inchoate or embryonic stage. The probability is, that the 
Apostle himself was quite aware of his uncertainty on the sub- 
ject, and quite satisfied to have it so. The same uncertainty 
concerning the spiritual agents of the divine will was a feature 
of the rabbinical teaching with which St Paul was familiar. 
According to that teaching, as set forth by Weber, there were 
ministering or angelic spirits of a personal and self-subsisting 
nature ; and there were others of a semi-personal order, which 
came and went, appeared and vanished, with the special 
missions on which they were sent, and apart from which they 
had no separate existence. There were spirits who could 
assume a visible shape and lay it aside at pleasure. And 
there were beings who hovered on the confines of reality, 
emanations from the divine power, which never enjoyed an 
independent existence. The conception of such agencies 
seems to have been common to oriental, classical, and Scandi- 
navian mythologies, as well as to rabbinical theology ; and 
it appears to us that St. Paul's conception of the Holy Spirit 
partook of the same character, for it cannot be gathered from 
his epistles that he distinctly recognized the Holy Spirit as a 
personal being. But the fourth Evangelist states broadly and 
explicitly what St. Paul's language may suggest. He repre- 
sents Jesus as speaking of the Spirit as another comforter like 
himself, but a better ; to admit of whose coming it was 
expedient that he himself should go away and absent himself 



576 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

from the company of his disciples ; another like himself and, 
therefore, a person, and not an impersonal energy. According 
to John xiv. 16, Christ himself is the Paraclete first in order, a 
designation which had been originally applied to the Logos by 
Philo, so that it affords a striking proof, among the many 
others, of the derivation by the Evangelist of the Logos-idea 
from the Hellenistic source. The Holy Spirit, being the other 
or the second Paraclete, ranks with the Logos, and becomes a 
third member of the heavenly hierarchy, distinct and personal 
like Christ himself. But of this distinctive doctrine of the 
Evangelist there is no hint or trace in Philo. That living, 
personal spirit, remains henceforth in the faith of the Church, 
the source or medium of an incalculable force or energy in the 
spiritual life and experience of all whose faith brings them 
within the sphere of his influence. He is the channel through 
which divine help descends to reinforce the efforts of the 
believer in his conflict with evil ; the heavenly messenger 
whose office is to guide believers into all truth, i.e., into the 
proper understanding of the truth already revealed, and into the 
discovery of new truth ; a view of his office which might be 
understood to explain the transformation which the evangelical 
tradition had undergone in the new Gospel.^ 

This doctrine of the personality of the Holy Spirit was in 
keeping with the general tendencies inherent in the growing 
dogma, and took immediate effect in Montanism, which, 
however, is a development, or phenomenon, which we choose 
to consider as lying beyond the limits of this discussion. 
For it seems to us, that the uncertainty which still rests 
upon the date of the Gospel makes it hazardous to say 

* It is not easy to reconcile what Jesus is made to say respecting the 
dependence of the coming of the Spirit upon his own going away (John xvi. 
7, comp. vii. 39) with what is said in Luke xi. 13, that God will give the 
Spirit without restriction to them that ask Him. We are inclined to see here 
an example of the advance of the fourth Evangelist beyond the synoptic 
tradition, and of the freedom with which he sets aside the latter in order to 
impart significance and consistency to his own doctrine. Chapter vii. 39 
may be an interpolation, and seems to show that the writer of it was aware 
of the difficulty, and sought to overcome it by drawing a distinction between 
the spirit in general and the Holy Spirit, the Comforter which should be 
given after Christ was glorified. " This spake he of the spirit, which they 
that believe on him should receive ; for the Holy Ghost was not yet given 
because that Jesus was not yet glorified/'' 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5/7 

what view is to be taken of certain affinities which exist 
between it and the Montanistic movement. The operation 
and indwelling within us of a spirit, which is not of us, is 
an idea which we may, or may not, be able to reconcile 
with the inviolable autonomy and individuality of the human 
spirit. But we have here, at least, all the elements of the 
complete orthodox or trinitarian system laid ready to hand 
for patristic and scholastic manipulation. In the resulting 
orthodox theology it was made to appear that Pauline doctrine 
was an anticipation of the " Johannine," and that the latter 
supplied a canon for the interpretation of the former ; in 
other words, that they were the complementary parts of one 
organic whole, which had gradually unfolded itself. The 
affinity between the trinitarian system and what is called the 
philosophical trinity is an imagination of modern theology 
which has little to recommend it. Indeed, these two have 
as little affinity as can well be imagined, and we may truly 
say of them that they have " nothing but the name in 
common." 



2 o 



CHAPTER XX. 



CONCLUSION. 



HAVING arrived at this point, it is unnecessary to trace the 
development of Christian doctrine further. It does not lie 
in our intention, or within the scope of this essay to do so. 
In conceiving of the death of Jesus as an atonement for the 
sin of the world — as the inauguration of a great redemptive 
process, St. Paul took an irrevocable step, far-reaching in 
its consequences, and broke away from the autosoteric doc- 
trine of Jesus himself. Of this central doctrine all his other 
dogmas were but inevitable corollaries. By this same 
doctrine, he supplied a starting point for the symbolism of 
Christian worship, and an object round which all devout 
sentiments and emotions, all feelings of awe and tender- 
ness, could play without reserve, so that human sympathies 
could be enlisted and consecrated to the service of religion. 
The fourth Evangelist did little beyond supplying, by means 
of the Logos-idea, a needful definition, a speculative basis, 
and a mystical character to the practical dogma of St. Paul. 
The eschatology of the New Testament, not being deduced 
or deducible from the experience either of Jesus or Paul, 
or of any human being, was probably very much determined 
or suggested by the inherited and current eschatological views 
of the age ; # and the doctrine of the sacraments of the 

*The vulgar, orthodox idea of the occupations in a future state of 
those who die in the faith is chiefly drawn from the Apokalypse, which 
there is considerable reason to believe is mainly a Jewish writing. In 
all that is said on the subject in the gospels and epistles, the ethical 
element predominates, and heaven is represented generally as a state 
of bliss. But in the Apokalypse the limits of a wise decorum are passed 
and exceeded by the sensuous and ritualistic aspect of the state. 



NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 579 

Church probably grew up in apostolic times, and in the 
succeeding age, in the light of practical needs and require- 
ments. They were autochthonic rites or observances for 
which the mythicizing fancy, after its nature, invented a 
historical institution and a symbolical meaning. The Church 
itself, radically considered, was but the association of men 
who were naturally drawn together for mutual support and 
by the bond of the common faith, and may be regarded 
as a divine institution, in the sense that all things really 
founded in human nature are also divine. The genesis of 
doctrine becomes more uncertain as we recede from the 
central doctrine, round which it all gathered and arranged 
itself with more or less consequence. And the successive 
steps by which Pauline dogma gradually took the more 
and more definite and orthodox shape, is matter of ecclesi- 
astical history, in whose records we see human reason and 
unreason at work to produce the result. 

As the difference is great between the teaching of Jesus 
and the dogma of St. Paul, so also is the difference great 
between the latter and the patristic and scholastic theology 
of later times. The difference between Pauline and scholastic 
dogma may here be briefly indicated. (1) The dogma of 
St. Paul was the interpretation of his own religious ex- 
perience, mainly by means of Jewish categories of thought, 
and in a less degree by Hellenistic speculation. In a manner 
relevant to the thought of the age, St. Paul constructed 
and developed his dogma only so far as was necessary to 
explain, reflect, and symbolize his own personal experience 
considered as the effect of the death and resurrection of 
Christ, and of his interposition generally in behalf of guilty 
man. So constructed and developed, the dogma was fitted 
to be an engine for producing a like experience in the 
minds of others. And by his powerful dialectic the Apostle 
so deepened the channel of thought, by which these two, 
the dogma and the spiritual experience, were connected, 
that the passage from the one to the other becomes easy, 
and all but inevitable. Beginning with a like experience, 
men fall almost inevitably into the dogma ; or beginning 
with the dogma, they may end with the experience. The 
terminus ad quern of the Apostle, becomes the terminus a 
quo of the Christian people, or vice versa. Paedagogically, 



580 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

the advantage of the dogma is great ; for while it veils 
the thought, it also renders the thought more level to popular 
apprehension, and for many minds, perhaps, more impres- 
sive. Paul made no attempt to construct a complete and 
consistent system of theological thought. The practical bearing 
of his theology absorbed his entire interest, and he did not, 
any more than Jesus, examine the presuppositions on which 
it was built. His dogma was fluid and his thought abounds 
with antinomies, which find their solution not in the thought, 
but in the experience of believers. But (2) scholastic theo- 
logians, overlooking these facts, took his doctrines as so 
many counters of thought, and made it their endeavour to 
construct, by deduction and combination, a rigid system, 
a complete theory of the universe ; a key by which to 
decipher the intentions of Providence, to read its secrets, 
and to explain human life and destiny — in short a system, 
much of which had no traceable, or only a conventional 
bearing on life and practice, and which in the end, 
from its manifest collision with psychological law, and the 
growing experience and speculation of the race, the present 
age has found to be no longer tenable. Still the Christian 
consciousness and experience, founded on the few simple 
ideas of Jesus which suggested, and still underlie the dogma, 
is the main thing, surviving, more or less, under all the 
conflicting systems which have been built upon the Pauline 
foundation. And it is in virtue of that consciousness alone, 
so far as it does survive, and not in virtue of either this 
or that form of the dogma, and least of all in virtue of 
our faith in the supernatural nature of Christianity, that 
we are still justified in calling ourselves Christians. We 
agree with Dr. Reville, in expressing a conviction that 
religion among civilized men is for ever destined to advance 
in the same direction which the gospel gave it, eighteen 
hundred years ago, " Either man will cease to be religious, 
or he will find himself compelled to be, in a certain measure, 
Christian." The conclusion here expressed by Dr. Reville 
may seem to be very indefinite, but not a few who are 
qualified by an extensive study of the critical data, for 
forming a judgment on the subject, will duly appreciate 
the mingled caution and decision with which he forecasts 
the religion of the future. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5X1 

In tracing the genesis of Christianity and endeavouring to 
show that it almost immediately assumed a form not 
contemplated by its founder, we have not, as much as we 
might have done, fortified our various positions, by pointing 
out the correspondences presented in the history of othcr 
religions. By way of making up for this omission, we may 
here briefly call attention to the very striking analogies 
between the genesis and history of Islam, and those of 
Christianity, analogies all the more striking by reason of 
the very different levels on which the two religions stand. 
Like the latter, the former, according to the most competent 
authorities, was to a large extent " the product not of the 
time, or of the people, but of the personality of its founder," 
though neither of the two founders professed to be the 
author of a new religion. The Arabian prophet did not lay 
claim to supernatural rank, or to a mediatorial office ; indeed 
he protested against anything of the kind strongly, because 
he knew that a danger lay in that direction, owing to the 
polytheistic tendencies of his countrymen. But hardly was 
he in his grave before his followers began to pay him 
adoration, and to supplicate his intercession with Allah in. 
their behalf; and in due time, this was followed up by two 
phenomena or developments : Cufism or the Mahometan 
form of mysticism ; and a dogmatic system, which was 
carried out, it is said, with as much elaboration and acumen 
as the dogmatic system of the Catholic Church itself, and 
dealing very much with the same questions, metaphysical, 
soteriological, and theological. The analogy with the 
development of Christianity seems to be complete. And 
if Jesus did not, like Mahomet, warn his followers against 
the idolatry of himself, it was simply because he, a pure 
monotheist, living in the midst of pure monotheists, saw no 
need for such a caution. Islam is still a vital force 
in the world ; but so far as we know, both Cufism and 
Mo'tazilitism have long lost their hold, being no true develop- 
ments of Islam and foreign to its nature. And the same 
fate seems surely to await the corresponding developments 
in the Christian Church ; no true and living interest attaching 
to either of them ; while the influence of Christianity, as the 
religion of Jesus, shows no signs of abatement. 

If it shall appear to the reader, that we have treated the 



5 52 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

historical data of the New Testament with unbecoming or 
unwarrantable freedom, let us remind him, that the synoptic 
Gospels are the only records which so much as profess to 
furnish materials for the life of Jesus ; for, besides other 
reasons for saying so, even the fourth Evangelist himself, in 
acknowledging (xx. 3 1 ) that he has another and a dogmatic 
object in view, goes far to withdraw any profession of the 
kind : and the synoptic Gospels are of such a nature, that 
they do not enable us to construct the actual life of Jesus. 
We cannot handle them as inspired records, or even as 
historical documents ; but simply as mythical histories, from 
which we may, at most, deduce the general outline of his 
life, as well as that system of morality and religion which 
has been the possession of humanity since his time, and 
which, as we have plainly shown that St. Paul cannot have 
been its author, we cannot but ascribe to Jesus. The 
supernatural element, which enters so largely into the 
synoptic narratives, cannot possibly be eliminated, except by 
a sifting process involving an extensive dislocation and 
disturbance of the general history. This eliminating process 
we have sought to carry out faithfully and thoroughly ; for 
we do not belong to the mediating or " half and half" school 
of theologians, who, to state it shortly, endeavour to effect a 
compromise with the scientific conscience by minimizing that 
element, leaving Jesus in possession of miraculous powers, 
but within narrow and indefinite limits ; or ascribing to him 
a certain superhuman personality, while denying to him the 
power of performing superhuman acts : confounding in him 
the human and the divine, the finite and the infinite, and 
attributing to him the function of bringing to pass in his 
disciples a like blending of the human and divine. By thus 
seeking to mediate between the natural and the supernatural 
view of Christianity, this school only betrays the weakness 
of its convictions, and its endeavour to sit upon two stools. 

No permanent advantage is ever gained by adopting a 
principle and then evading its consequences. Under pretext 
of disengaging the inward meaning from the outward form 
of dogma, or by way of making the latter less obnoxious 
to modern thought, some of the advanced schools of theology 
seek to get rid, or in reality lose hold of what is essential 
to the dogma, without apparently perceiving or without 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 583 

acknowledging the fact. In stretching , the dogma to meet 
the modern thought, it has somewhere been said that they 
snap the connection with the supernatural ground. No doubt 
the dogma has an inward meaning, for it is the form in 
which the Christian consciousness or religious experience 
seeks to express or explain itself; but to fall back upon 
that inward meaning and to retain it alone is not only to 
discard the dogmatic form, but to let go the supernatural 
sanction. And all attempts of this kind do but furnish a 
proof that this same supernatural element, which, in the 
first and for many succeeding ages, served to inspire men 
with awe, and even to strengthen the claims of Christianity 
upon their belief, not only is, but is felt to be an insur- 
mountable objection to it for the modern mind. On the 
other hand, if we deny the supernatural origin and character 
of Christianity, it is incumbent on us to show, as we have 
attempted to do, that natural laws and historical conditions 
are sufficient to account for both. And if we believe that 
nature itself is divine, Christianity will lose nothing by such 
a construction. 

That the divine power was present, immanent in the. 
life of Jesus, as well as in that long line of lawgivers, prophets, 
and sages, who prepared the way before him : that it is 
mysteriously present in all history, ancient and modern, 
secular and religious, we do not question. We believe that 
in Jesus that divine power found its most polished instrument 
and reached its highest and purest expression ; but that is 
a true observation which some one, we think, has made, 
that of not one moment of his life, of not one of his acts 
can it be said, " Lo, here is something above nature." It 
is only through nature without or within us that God 
manifests Himself. That, in this divine immanence, there 
is a great mystery, transcending all human or finite thought, 
conception, or power of representation, we admit. And we 
have a strong suspicion, that it is the irrepressible endeavour 
to form to ourselves some sensuous representation, some 
intellectual conception of this great mystery: to comprehend 
the incomprehensible, and to utter the inexpressible, which 
has given rise to the dogmatic systems of all the great 
religions of the world. These, wherever thought is active, 
have necessarily only a transient hold upon men's minds. 



584 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

The intellect may shift uneasily from one form of dogma 
to another, and may oscillate between competing systems ; 
but in the end it will throw all aside and find repose in 
a more simple faith, such as glowed in the mind of Jesus ; 
a faith whose proof does not lie outside, but in the depths 
of the human consciousness. The only mystery of which 
men will never get rid, is the all-encompassing mystery of 
the universe, which we cannot penetrate : the mystery which 
has defied, and will for ever defy all the efforts of human 
intelligence to solve : a mystery which exhibits no tendency 
even towards solution, but grows and deepens upon us the 
more we reflect and ponder over it. In the presence of this 
mystery, we can only bow the head and say, " Verily, thou 
art a God that hidest thyself." Of the presence and action 
of this mysterious power, we regard the evolution of the 
religious idea, through the long history of Judaism and 
Christianity, as the most signal proof. And it is by the 
purification of this idea, and especially, by its disengagement 
from the supernatural hypothesis, that this proof will gain 
in strength. 

If we conceive of the divine power as entering as a distinct, 
supernatural element into Christianity, or into the person 
of its founder and of his disciples, the character of mystery 
would for us be gone. In becoming distinct and separate, 
it would become a finite factor along with others without 
being mysterious; which is something inconceivable. We 
believe, on the contrary, that mystery is common to all 
existence ; and that the pre-eminent glory of Christianity 
consists, not in clearing the area of religion from mystery 
in the sense now indicated ; but in revealing to us that 
ideal of humanity which our own deepest instincts recognize 
as the true ideal, and in giving us practical helps and 
encouragements to choose it as the earnest and not wholly 
fruitless aim of our life and aspirations. We do not seek- 
by our view of its genesis to banish mystery from the origin 
of Christianity. We say, that the mystery consists in that 
self-subsisting independence which enabled Jesus to rise above 
his surroundings, so that the religious element into which 
he was born could not vanquish it ; and in the spontaneous 
generation in his mind of a higher view of the religious 
relation than that which prevailed among his countrymen. 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5 cS 5 

But this is a mystery, which, however great, is yet the 
same in kind as that which obtains more or less at even- 
point of human progress and development ; unique, but 
not exceptional in the history of religion. After we have 
put aside the supernatural element of the evangelical history, 
Jesus still rises before us as the teacher and finest model 
of humanity, and the value of his doctrine is unimpaired. 
He remains for all time the living canon of humanity, by 
which the religious man has to shape and mould himself. 
We have seen how this living canon grew by the fashioning 
of many hands, and it still lives and grows ; hardly an age 
but has added some touch to its perfection, and few will 
doubt that a new touch has been given to it in these latter 
days by the author of Ecce Homo, in attributing to him 
" the enthusiasm of humanity." The advancing thought of 
man gathers round that august figure, and exalts it ever 
more to the soul, so that it fashions the generations by 
which it is fashioned, and gathers into itself all the growing 
thought and experience of man, and conserves it for generations 
yet unborn. Jesus appears to us not less great, not less 
fitted to awaken our sympathy and veneration, though we 
see him working no miracle, and though our view of him 
as suspended on the cross were the last that was seen of 
him. It was, we conceive, the memory of his teaching, 
and the contemplation of his dying moments, in which he 
gave the supreme proof of his devotion to the will of God, 
and to the good of man, that revived the faith of the first 
disciples ; that convulsed the soul of Paul, and conjured 
up to his inner eye, the vision of him as once more alive, 
encompassed with a light above that of the sun at noon ; 
and we believe also that the moral greatness and beauty 
revealed in him is the sight, which, above all others, sustains 
the hope of man. For, above all the spectacles which this 
earth has ever presented, it is that which confirms our hope, 
as it did that of St. Peter and his companions, that the 
plant of humanity, which could put forth such a " consummate 
flower," is not meant to perish. 

In attempting to offer a modern view of the genesis and 
early development of Christianity in place of the canonical 
view of it, we have been obliged to introduce a pragmatism 
which may be wearisome to most, and at main- points not 



586 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

satisfactory to any of our readers. But we would ask them to 
remember two things — first, that this is pre-eminently one of 
those cases in which, as Dr. Baur points out, the separate 
members of a construction, when looked at in themselves, may 
appear to be doubtful, or unimportant, or not very cogent, but 
may derive support and significance from the unity and consist- 
ency of the whole ; and secondly, that we do not insist on the 
exclusive validity of this pragmatic element. We only present 
it as that which best satisfies, or most readily suggests itself to 
our own mind. Much of the ground over which we have 
travelled may be debatable, in regard to which the critics 
have not yet spoken the last word ; but the book may stand as 
a whole, and the same general result may be arrived at, though 
some of the minor details may be differently stated. It 
may be that some other recast or reconstruction of the evan- 
gelical history may approve itself to others, who may adopt the 
same general point of view with ourselves. But one thing is 
certain, that if the supernatural element, according to our 
hypothesis, did not enter as an integer into the actual current 
of that history, but was introduced or inwoven by the mythi- 
cizing tradition, the genesis of Christianity must have differed 
widely, nay, enormously, from that which can possibly be 
gathered from a literal or textual exegesis, and an unsceptical 
study of the New Testament. The genesis, as we endeavour 
to trace it, can only be regarded as a theory or hypothesis to 
explain the outstanding facts, or as an approximation more or 
less to the secret underlying history. In the nature of the 
case, and in the absence of documentary records of such a 
history, it can be nothing else. It can only be offered as the 
possible, more or less probable or conjectural, but hardly as the 
actual history. Still, for the intelligent and scientific reader 
this will be no objection to the attempt here made, provided 
the theory or conjecture suffice to take up and to account for 
all the outstanding facts, including what has been called the 
great " posthumous miracle of Jesus," viz., the beneficent and 
permanent results of his life-work. Let it be our apology for 
this undertaking that the state of modern thought regarding the 
supernatural seems to demand that some such attempt should 
be made. The genesis of Christianity is a fact of which the 
supernatural explanation is assailed on all sides, but the fact 
in all its gravity remains, and if we refuse to accept the 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 587 

orthodox explanation, we are bound to offer another. And 
even if this task, to which we have addressed ourselves, be not 
only unskilfully executed, but even erroneous in its conception, 
yet the toleration of such hypotheses, and their candid con- 
sideration is, as has been often remarked, the price which the 
Church has to pay for the preservation of a scientific interest in 
the history of our religion, and for a deepening acquaintance 
with its spirit. 

By many it may be regarded as a great moral delinquency, 
or daring impiety, to shock or unsettle, by such a criticism as 
has been applied in this volume, the minds of simple Chris- 
tians who live by it, and find it to be the great source of 
strength for the duties, and of consolation under the trials of 
life. But it has to be borne in mind that something is due to 
the inquiring and educated classes of the community, to whom 
religion is not a mere luxury, but as much a necessity as it is 
to the ignorant and credulous. There is no doubt that a 
deeply religious sentiment may even yet be fostered both by 
Catholicism and by orthodox Protestantism ; but they will 
cease more and more to serve this purpose, in proportion as 
men are compelled by the advance of science and of scientific 
criticism, to abandon the naive or ancient theory of divine 
government ; and there are many ominous signs that this pro- 
cess is already far advanced. " Outside the pale of the so- 
called religious world, and firmly resolved never to enter it, 
there are thousands of men, not inferior (to those inside the 
pale) in character, capacity, or knowledge of the questions at 
issue, who estimate the purely spiritual elements of the Chris- 
tian faith as highly as these do, but will have nothing to do 
with the Churches, because in their apprehension, and for them 
the profession of belief in the miraculous, on the evidence 
offered, would be simply immoral." Such is the testimony of a 
man (Professor Huxley) who is entitled to speak for the large 
class to which he belongs. For them the offence of the cross 
is not moral, but, what is still more insurmountable, intellectual. 
Their objection is to the gospel regarded as a supernatural 
system. Whether this offence — this objection, can be removed 
and the gospel yet remain a power of God for the higher 
education of the race, is a question which ought not and 
cannot be set aside; for if it be set aside, nothing can thereby 
be gained for the cause of religion. According to the same 



588 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 

authority, scepticism and unbelief are advancing " with continu- 
ally accelerated velocity " among the educated and scientific 
classes, and are from them rapidly " descending to the un- 
educated, or those who have but a smattering of science and 
theology." The evil day, if such it be, is already upon us, and 
can no longer be averted, and there is little or no prospect of 
an age of faith ever returning. Periods of scepticism and 
unbelief in the past have doubtless been succeeded by a general 
and perceptible return to orthodoxy ; but this was owing partly 
to the fact that the constancy of the natural order was not 
generally accepted, and that sceptics and unbelievers, being in a 
small minority, were unable to maintain their ground against 
the overwhelming mass and power of vulgar pathos and pre- 
judice in favour of orthodox opinion : whereas in this age, for 
the first time these eighteen hundred years, all is changed — 
the scientific idea has permeated popular literature, and both 
together are at work in almost every household, spreading 
doubt and scepticism on every side ; so that the cause of 
orthodoxy, in the widest sense of the word, will soon cease to 
have the power of numbers on its side, and be " deprived of the 
support to the imagination which an age of faith afforded." 
The time has come when, as was recently declared by a great 
Conservative statesman, reaction or stationariness in political 
affairs is no longer possible ; and the same may be said in 
respect of theological thought. Were the spread of views such 
as those here expounded to call forth a reaction towards ortho- 
doxy, it would only be as the reflux of the wave in the flowing 
tide ; and it seems as if the only means of saving the Christian 
profession — of making good its claim to the continued alleg- 
iance of men, and of preserving those moral and spiritual 
elements with which it is instinct, is to sacrifice its miraculous 
elements, and to recognize it as the absolute form of natural 
religion, with Jesus Christ as its High Priest and bright 
Exemplar. When this is accomplished, religion will become 
a very simple matter ; and he will be seen to be the true Chris- 
tian who, believing in God as his Heavenly Father, confides in 
His forgiveness of the sins that are past, and in this confidence 
aims at the ideal life of Jesus, leaving the rest to the disposal 
of God. 

Our endeavour has been to present a view of Christianity 
alternative to the orthodox or canonical conception of it as a 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 5cSo, 

supernatural system. We have done our best to be just to this 
alternative view- — that is, to state the case for it as well as we 
could, hardly, indeed, in the hope of carrying conviction to 
many minds, but trusting, at the most, that we have succeeded 
in showing that, if this be the true view of it, Christianity does 
not forfeit its claim to be, in a very proper sense, a revelation 
to the mind of man, entitled to man's reverence as a directory 
of human life on its moral and religious side. If we have 
presumed to undertake a great task with inadequate resources, 
it may at least be said that the task has not been self-imposed, 
but imposed, as we have shown, by the circumstances and 
necessities of the time. And if, in the performance of this 
task, we have relied upon certain conclusions of modern criti- 
cism, literary and historical, which have not commanded uni- 
versal assent, we have done so, at least not blindly, nor without 
discrimination, inasmuch as we have tested them to the best of 
our ability. All or most of these results have been arrived at 
by specialists, without immediate reference to the general 
question of the origin and nature of Christianity : and the 
remark is obvious, that the fact, if it be the fact, that by their 
means we have succeeded in establishing a coherent and not 
unworthy conception of Christianity, different from that to 
which the uncritical or pseudo-critical study of the Scriptures 
has led men, affords of itself a strong presumption that these 
results are in the main trustworthy. 



APPENDIX. 

APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF ANTI-SUPERNATURALISM 
TO THE CHRISTIAN DOGMA. 

Having, in the second chapter of this volume, discussed the anti- 
supernatural hypothesis or theory of the divine action, it behoves 
us to determine how much of the orthodox or scriptural system 
must be sacrificed to conciliate the modern, i.e.< the scientific spirit. 
And it is clear that if we really and seriously accept of that theory, 
we have no choice but to discard, one by one, what are usually 
styled the distinctive, cardinal dogmas respecting the person and 
functions of the Founder of Christianity. And, first of all, we must 
discard the dogma of the incarnation, which lies at the base of the 
orthodox system. We must take Jesus to have been by nature, and 
to have remained, from first to last, a member pure and simple of 
the human family : a link of the human chain, just as any of our- 
selves are, having all the properties of human nature, but those of 
no other : one whose native faculty and character were, to the same 
extent with those of other men, the product of his ancestry and of 
his surroundings, and whose life and work went to determine and 
to influence the life and history of subsequent generations. We take 
him to have been a man and the son of a man; and if we adopt 
the phraseology of calling him a divine man, we do so, not as im- 
plying that he is exclusively entitled to that designation. We may 
hold, and we do hold, that by his spiritual and ideal nature, man 
is kin to the divine ; that there is a spark or germ of divinity in 
each member of the race, and that that germ is part of his natural 
constitution. We may also hold that in the man Jesus this germ 
reached a conspicuous manifestation or high development, so high 
and so conspicuous as to arrest the attention and draw the venera- 
tion of many who witnessed his manner of life. But we may hold 
so much without admitting that he was divine in any exclusive 
superhuman, or supernatural sense. We say that he was a man in 



APPENDIX. 591 

all respects, and nothing but a man — a member of the great human 
brotherhood. And in saying so we do not feel that we do injury 
to our religion, or shake our faith in God. It is impossible for us 
to enter into the feeling of one of our present-day theologians, who 
has said, " As regards the divinity of Christ, I can only say that 
without that I have no religion and no God." A more wild and 
hazardous avowal can hardly be conceived, and can only be ex- 
plained as the utterance, on the part of a truly Christian man, of a 
passing phase of feeling. For, unless Christianity rests upon the 
doctrines of natural religion, what is it but a baseless fabric floating 
in the cloudland of human fancy? Very different, indeed, was the 
view of so old a divine as Richard Baxter, who, if we remember 
aright, somewhere says that the truths of natural religion are more 
certain to his mind than those of Scripture ; as indeed they must be 
for us all, if they are, as they are, the presuppositions of the latter. 
Whatever becomes of the distinctive doctrines of Christianity, let 
us at least hold fast, on independent grounds, the truths of natural 
religion. 

While we readily acknowledge the relative innocence or sinless- 
ness of Jesus, we are also compelled to deny his absolute innocence ; 
because the latter is incompatible with the theory of moral develop- 
ment through the consciousness and experience of evil, and with 
the nature of a finite being such as we believe him to have been. 
We cannot say of one who was liable to temptation, as he waS, 
that he was also absolutely sinless. We may unite the two predi- 
cates in words, but not in idea, nor in fact. If Jesus was absolutely 
without sin he was not a true man; just as, if liable to temptation, 
he was not true God : for it is irrefragable that God can neither be 
tempted, nor can He tempt any man. And if we make him two in 
one, it is as much as to say that he is neither God nor man, but 
by all analogy a tertium quid— something different from both; a 
conclusion to which we are also led by the doctrine that he was 
sprung from a divine father and a human mother. The origin of 
these doctrines of the divinity and sinlessness of Jesus may easily 
be accounted for by the remarkable and overwhelming experiences 
of his first disciples ; but the scholastic reasoning which has been 
expended to overcome the instinctive feeling with which the reflecting 
mind rejects them can only be regarded as unintelligible jargon, or 
as an effort put forth by vigorous minds for many generations to solve 
an insoluble question, to explain what seems inexplicable, to believe 
what satisfies curiosity, or to uphold traditional beliefs. 

In denying to Jesus the attribute of absolute sinlessness, we do 



592 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

not feel that we much, if at all, disperse the aureole which surrounds 
his person, or detract from that feeling of veneration with which we 
have been accustomed to regard his character. To invest him with 
that attribute is to remove him from the level of humanity. For to 
err is human, and natures which are most highly endowed are not 
necessarily those which commit the fewest or the smallest mistakes. 
The man who, being highly endowed, yet escapes all visible or 
appreciable shortcomings, can gain little by being called divine. 
He is the true, the model man, in whose life the development of 
the divine or better nature within him proceeds by a course which 
approximates to the normal ; and who, being susceptible of tempta- 
tion, as God is not, yet approaches within a measurable, not to say 
infinitesimal distance of the ideal of humanity. Such an one is 
little less worthy of veneration than a being who, by his very nature, 
is impeccable. The life and character of Jesus were idealized in 
the evangelical tradition. But the honour and distinction cannot 
be denied him of having, by his life and doctrine, suggested the 
ideal after which the narrative of his life was shaped. And the fact 
that men who were in hourly intercourse with him, while placed in 
the most trying and testing circumstances, could discern no evil in 
him, could even derive from his behaviour the strangely novel idea 
of a perfectly sinless being, is enough to establish his claim to a 
position in the history of mankind absolutely peerless, if we except 
the dim and doubtful figure of Buddha ; but far indeed from estab- 
lishing his claim to the possession of absolute sinlessness; enough 
to constitute him an object of profound reverence and of earnest 
imitation, but not of that entire prostration of spirit, or of that 
worship which is due to Him only of whom we can predicate the 
non posse peccare. It is not surprising that the disciples should have 
paid honours little short of divine to one who so fully satisfied their 
moral sense. But they can hardly be accepted as competent wit- 
nesses to his absolute innocence. If already during his lifetime they 
formed such an estimate, it can only be regarded as a confession 
that there was in his character and conduct a phenomenal depth 
and beauty which baffled comprehension and rivalry. But if the 
idea grew up subsequently in their minds there are other explana- 
tions which can be given of it. 

We do not here enter into the consideration of exceptions which 
have been taken by Francis Newman and others to some of the words 
and actions of J esus ; because we regard these for the most part as 
examples of a minute, not to say captious criticism, to which we attach 
little value. When a manifest flaw is detected in the action attributed 



APPENDIX. 593 

to him by a synoptist, as in the miraculous narrative of his commanding 
the devils to enter the swine, we, as a matter of course, regard it with 
Professor Huxley, as a slip, or proof of moral bluntness on the part 
of the mythical tradition on its own ground. But we rest upon this, 
that the spiritual senses of fallible men cannot suffice to certify the 
fact of absolute sinlessness, any more than their bodily senses can 
certify the perfect sphericity of a ball. Moreover, it is evident, that 
the disciples derived their highest notions of morality from the life 
and conduct of Jesus, and that, beyond that, they neither could nor 
did go. While then, their general testimony to the absolute perfection 
of his moral character cannot be accepted, the high ideal which they 
derived from his life may fairly be accepted as a proof of its in- 
comparable beauty and its relative innocence. It may also be said 
with some confidence, that, if the conviction of the absolute sinlessness 
of Jesus was impressed upon the disciples before his passion, that 
impression was made involuntarily on his part, if not against his 
remonstrance. For, omitting the testimony of the fourth Gospel, which, 
for reasons assigned in this volume, we do not regard as authentic, 
we may say, that Jesus was habitually reticent with respect to himself : 
and on the one occasion on which he was addressed by a title which 
implied his sinlessness, he is made to decline the title as a trespass 
upon a divine prerogative (Mark x. 17), though, of course, orthodox 
interpreters have no difficulty in putting another meaning upon his 
words. The original, and probably the most authentic version of the 
answer which Jesus made to the young man who called him "Good 
Master," and asked "what (good) thing shall I do, that I may inherit 
eternal life," is given by St. Mark (who, by consent of many recent 
and distinguished critics, is now regarded as the earliest of the 
evangelists), and is, "Why callest thou me good? There is none 
good but one, that is God." The answer here is a rebuke to the 
man for so addressing him, and may naturally be understood, as if 
Jesus intended to decline the application of the epithet " good " 
to himself. According to the best authenticated reading of the 
narrative in St. Matthew's Gospel, again (xix. 17), the answer of Jesus 
is, "Why askest thou me concerning that which is good,*' an answer 
which is a rebuke to the man for putting the question, not for his 
manner of addressing Jesus : a rebuke too, which is wholly un- 
deserved and inappropriate, inasmuch as the question was one which 
might very properly be put to Jesus as a professed teacher of righteous 
ness, and to which, therefore, he might justly be expected to give a 
direct unevasive answer. Now, this departure from the original form 
of the answer, even though it may have been due, not to the Evangelist 

2 p 



594 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

Matthew himself, but to a redactor, affords evidence of a tendency 
in the church to eliminate from the teaching of Jesus whatever might 
seem to conflict with the dogmatic view of his person as a son of 
God, and therefore perfectly sinless. 

Once more, Jesus told men to " follow" him, as a "compendious 
direction to those who desired to practice true righteousness." But 
St. Paul also said something of the same kind : " Be ye followers of 
me, even as I am of Christ." And if it cannot be inferred from this 
counsel that the apostle claimed to do more than follow Christ at a 
distance, as little can we infer from the words of Jesus that he offered 
himself as the absolute ideal. There is, in the synoptists, abundant 
evidence that Jesus was far and away superior to the frailties that are 
common, and all but universal in humanity. It is not too much to 
say, with Dr. Bruce, that " it came as natural to him to love and labour 
and suffer and deny himself for others, as it comes to most men to 
be selfish." But there is no unchallengeable proof anywhere that 
he claimed in so many words to be sinless. Even that saying reported 
as his by the fourth Evangelist, "Which of you convinceth me of sin," 
admits obviously of quite another meaning. And the language that 
he is elsewhere made to use, which seems to demand such a con- 
struction, only serves, with much else, to cast suspicion on the credibility 
of that Gospel. 

The reverence with which the person of Jesus is justly regarded 
prevents many of us from giving free play to our thoughts on this 
subject, and, even when we feel constrained at the bidding of science 
and the growing thoughts of men to abandon the dogmatic view of 
his person, it gives a wrench, if not to our moral nature, yet to our 
cherished feelings and associations, which, at times, is almost more 
than heart can bear. But the truth of things must ever form the 
soundest foundation for the ultimate good of man, and in that we 
must acquiesce, cost for the present what it may to personal feelings, 
and to sentiments which are not so much personal as rather the legacy 
of ages. And we repeat what has been already said, that it is no 
disparagement to Jesus to regard him as a mere man, if, at the same 
time, it be admitted that he realized the ideal of humanity, so approxi- 
mately as to kindle the idea of true humanity in the world. Is a man 
who comes within a measurable distance of fulfilling the law of man's 
higher being the less worthy of our esteem because he is not also, 
in some inexplicable sense, divine? In being a perfect man, or only 
separated from that height by an interval that is invisible to us, and 
so realizing a divine idea, may he not be said to be in this sense, 
divine? We can easily understand how his disciples came upon the 



APPENDIX. 595 

thought of ascribing to him divine attributes in a sense beyond this, 
and yet we have a suspicion, that in so doing, they took the wrong 
way to exalt him. Which is the more adorable spectacle ? A man 
equipped with supernatural powers, conscious of a call and mission 
to a great work, and doing it by an effort, which seems gigantic and 
exemplary only by excluding the thought of these powers? Or, a 
simple man, emerging from the multitude, fired by a desire to show 
a better way to his fellows, and to erect a higher standard of life, 
awakening deadly enmity by his teaching, and exemplifying it by his 
patience under wrong, so kindling an enthusiasm of discipleship, and 
accomplishing a greater work than perhaps he ever dreamed of? If 
the former spectacle presents a picture of greater condescension, does 
not the latter excite a more truly human interest? Does not the 
supernatural endowment go far to destroy the exemplariness of the 
life? Our forefathers seem to have enjoyed the recital of feats 
performed by the heroes of romance, clothed in impenetrable steel, 
and armed with weapons of magical virtue. But, for the men of 
this age, the felt unreality of such feats has deprived them of all 
genuine interest. The application of this remark does not need to 
be dwelt upon, and though the criticism thus suggested may be very 
hackneyed and commonplace, it is none the less to the point, not- 
withstanding the many subtle distinctions which have been made use 
of to evade its force. And, yet again, if Jesus was equipped with 
supernatural power, which, in a measure, he transmitted to the 
Church, must it not for ever remain a wonder that so little has been 
effected by means so extravagant; while, on the other supposition, 
must not the wonder be that so much has been effected? But 
enough has been said to show that nothing here advanced is calcu- 
lated to dim the lustre which, for so many ages, has surrounded 
the head of Jesus. To all who come within touch of his spirit he 
must ever remain a son of God, kut efox'/i 7 , if not by the evidence 
of miracle and resurrection, yet by virtue of that essentially human 
sentiment which ever craves for some finite impersonation of infinite 
goodness, and has decreed the apotheosis of him in whom the craving 
was best satisfied. 

As to those narratives in the Gospels which represent Jesus as exer- 
cising, at will, miraculous powers over nature, animate and inanimate, 
we decline of course to receive them as literal history, and we have to 
account for the origin of such narratives, and for the credence attached to 
them, in some other way than by supposing them to be the literal records 
of events or incidents that actually occurred. But theologians, even of 
the most negative school, have never denied that some very remarkable 



596 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

phenomena may have signalized his public life, and have exercised a 
very important influence upon the mind of his disciples, and, perhaps, 
even upon his own. He may have cured or alleviated nervous and 
hysterical complaints and mental derangements of various kinds by a 
certain " moral ascendency " which he gained over many who came 
within the sphere of his influence. There may have been enough 
exhibited of this nature to suggest to his disciples the possession by him 
of some more than human powers, and to give a hint and an impulse to 
the mythopceic process which, as we shall yet see, invested his history 
with much of a mysterious and miraculous halo. Well authenticated 
phenomena of this description have occurred repeatedly, even in 
modern times, in alliance with an exalted state of religious feeling. 
And if we take into account the state of religious excitement, which 
the teaching of Jesus was calculated to produce, and the sympathy 
which was drawn out towards him personally, we shall find it not 
impossible to believe that a species of " moral therapeutic " might 
be exercised by him ; and also that without his, in the first instance, 
even intending or foreseeing it, physical sufferings and mental disorders 
might disappear in those who felt the mild but imposing influence that 
emanated from his person. 

From the Gospel narrative it is apparent that men were astonished 
at his doctrine, and powerfully wrought upon by the authority and 
confidence with which he appealed to their consciences : that faith 
was kindled and veneration inspired, before he had wrought any seem- 
ing miracle, and that in villages and districts where his teaching had 
made no such impression, and a captious, stolid and unsympathetic 
spirit still prevailed, his progress was marked by no extraordinary 
phenomena. The same observation, or something akin to it, has 
been made in many other cases in which miraculous powers were 
thought to have been exercised : and what is the inference in the 
case before us, as well as in those others of a similar kind, but that the 
faith of the patient was the co-efficient cause of the apparent miracle ? 
In other words, it was not any supernatural virtue exerted by Jesus, 
or going out of him, but the energy of faith exerted by the ailing 
person himself, which made the latter for the time forgetful of his 
ailment, or enabled him permanently to cast it off. What Jesus 
appears frequently to have said was thus literally true, that it was 
their faith alone which made whole the sick who came to him ; not 
that their faith had set free or evoked a divine power on his part 
to heal, but that faith itself was the actual wonder-working power. 

In some cases of this kind we are told that the cure was effected 
before the attention of Jesus had been called or directed to the 



APPENDIX. 597 

sufferer, and without his having to help the faith of the sick person 
by saying, " I will, be thou clean," as he sometimes did when he 
saw the struggle going on in the man's mind. In such cases he saw 
that the cure had already taken place without his intervention, with- 
out the interposition even of a word or a look on his part, and it 
only remained for him to say, " Go in peace, thy faith hath made 
thee whole." The exalted state of feeling, the sense of blissful awe 
produced in sensitive minds by the voice and aspect of one whom 
they believed to be a teacher sent from God ; " the mysterious 
shiver," " the sudden shock of emotion," sent through their minds 
by his passing shadow, or even by the touch and rustle of his gar- 
ment, were enough to produce wonderful effects within the area in 
which the moral and physical nature of man act and react on each 
other. In all such cases, however, the witnesses and bystanders, and 
even the persons themselves who were the subjects of the influence, 
ascribed the effects, as a matter of course, to a power which Jesus had 
put forth, to a virtue which had gone out of him. And we need not 
wonder that the evangelists who report these occurrences should, in 
doing so, merely reflect or reproduce the popular belief ;, and, in 
reference to some occasions of the kind, give such a turn to the 
language and action of Jesus as to represent that belief as having 
his sanction. 

We can also conceive that when the fame of such events went 
abroad, the minds of many would thereby be laid hold of; faith 
would wax strong, and the phenomena would, in consequence, become 
both more frequent of occurrence and more striking in character. 
Nay, it is even conceivable that Jesus himself, sharing as he did in 
the theories of spiritual influence common to his age and country, 
might come to regard them as manifestations of a divine power 
resident in himself, and exerted in confirmation of his mission and 
authority, of which he was deeply convinced. It is not more difficult, 
for instance, to conceive this of that pure heart and lofty intellect, 
than to conceive how he could share in the belief, common to 
that age, in demoniacal possession. It is also natural to suppose 
that while Jesus might be fully conscious that whatever power ot 
this kind he possessed was limited to the area or class of dis- 
orders in which faith could operate, bystanders, on the other hand, 
might overlook this limitation of his power, and ascribe to him a 
power of working cures which were wholly beyond his scope and 
faculty. It was inevitable that if he were credited with miraculous 
powers at all, it would come to be imagined that these powers were 
not confined to a small class of bodily and mental disorders of a 



59^ THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

nervous and hysterical character, including the phenomena which were 
regarded as due to possession, but extended also to organic derange- 
ments and defects which lie far beyond the range within which the 
will and the emotions can possibly take effect, and even to vegetable 
and animal life, and to the elements of external nature (Mark iv. 39, 
Matth. xxi. 19). That mind can act upon mind is unquestionable. 
And, in view of the phenomena of mesmerism and hypnotism, physio- 
logists now tell us that it is " impossible to assign any limit to the 
influence of mind upon body." No one can doubt, however, that 
the influence of mind is limited to the body with which it stands in 
mediate or immediate organic connection, and that the synoptists go 
far beyond that limit when they represent the will of Jesus as extend- 
ing its influence to the motions of external nature, and to material 
elements between which and his mind there could be no possible 
rapport. And the high probability is that they much exaggerate the 
influence of his will, even in the sphere within which such rapport is 
conceivable. 

There are not wanting indications in gospel history itself that the 
exhibition of powers regarded as miraculous by his disciples was 
involuntary on the part of Jesus : the unavoidable accompaniment or 
result of the enthusiasm or expectancy created by his doctrine and 
personality, and more or less embarrassing to himself in the prose- 
cution of his main design, which was to lay the foundation of an ideal 
kingdom, whereof he declared emphatically that it should come without 
observation, i.e., without the accompaniment of signs and wonders : a 
kingdom, therefore, whose very nature was contradicted, and in danger 
of being compromised by association with such abnormal phenomena. 
His loving and compassionate nature would not suffer him, indeed, alto- 
gether to withhold his helping hand : to discourage the budding faith, or 
to defeat the healing power, that resided in the faith which sprang up 
around his path : he could not refuse to meet half-way the struggling 
principle which carried in it the blessing of bodily health and mental 
composure. The faith, which thus, as it were, appealed to him, was already 
operating sensibly as a virtue, to which his mildly authoritative encourage- 
ment did but give its full effect. But his frequent injunction to those 
who had experienced its healing power, to tell no man what had befallen 
them : his repeated disapproval of his countrymen, who demanded 
that he should give them a proof of his miraculous powers, "a sign 
from heaven," i.e., that he should work a miracle in cold blood, and 
in the absence of that faith which was the indispensable instrument 
and medium of such phenomena : or, perhaps, according to another 
conjecture, that he should gratuitously light up some such bright 



APPENDIX. 599 

effulgence in the sky as was expected by the Jews to accompany 
and legitimate the advent of the Messiah — such a miracle, in short, 
as should satisfy a scoffing, or at least a sceptical, and uninterested 
judgment : his declaration that the generation which demanded and 
expected such a sign was an evil and adulterous generation to which 
no sign should be given but that of the prophet Jonah, viz., the 
sign contained in the nature of the teaching itself — these are so 
many converging proofs, either that he was conscious of possessing 
no such powers, or that the phenomena, which did occur, and which 
gave countenance to such an idea, if not at variance with the nature 
of his mission, were yet considered by himself either as not essential 
to it, or as not materially advancing, if they did not even obscure 
its nature and form an impediment to its successful prosecution. 

The truth seems to be that the powers of healing and of exorcising, 
which were, or were thought to be possessed by Jesus, depended for 
their successful exercise, or, let us say, their manifestation, on the 
profound impression made by his doctrine and personality on the 
circle around him ; but, that the phenomena suggested to his followers 
the possession by him of objective miraculous powers which he could 
put forth at will, or by an act of volition ; and this suggestion, being 
once taken up, was enough to enhance his reputation, to excite a 
feeling of expectancy, and to contribute with other factors to give an 
impulse to the mythopoeic process. 

The wonderful works, or so-called miracles, which Jesus is said to 
have performed, were by their nature fugitive — such as to leave no 
visible effect behind them which can be traced to him, and investi- 
gated by us, so as to furnish a direct proof of their historical reality. 
Our faith in them has to depend on the testimony of those who are 
said to have witnessed them ; and many exceptions may, as is well 
known, be taken to that testimony, and the media through which it 
reaches us are many ; and hence apologists, with this in their view, 
have appealed to a standing miracle — to a miracle which is still extant, 
still passing under our eyes, so that we ourselves at this late age are 
witnesses of it, viz., the great and lasting success which has attended 
the preaching of the gospel, the "posthumous miracle" of Jesus, as 
it has been called, as that one which renders all the others which 
were transient in their nature credible. But this appeal only serves 
to confuse the true issue by the loose application of the word " miracle." 
The rapid propagation of the gospel and its grand permanent results 
may no doubt be called miraculous in a figurative sense, and will 
even appear to be so in a literal sense if we overlook all the spiritual 
forces of humanity which the gospel has brought into play ; but, if 






600 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

we observe these spiritual forces closely, we shall see that, being 
themselves included in the natural sphere, they account for that success 
in a natural way. It can only be said in a popular, literary, and 
unscientific sense that this posthumous achievement of Jesus "con- 
tradicted the probabilities or uniform sequences which men call laws 
of nature and of history." This can seem to be true only when we 
take a narrow and partial view of these laws — a view which excludes 
those of our social and spiritual nature. It is only, if we leave these 
latter out of our calculation, that we have to supply their place by 
the interposition of supernatural agencies. 

A species of apology for the purely physical or nature miracles 
recorded of Jesus in the Gospels, allied to that just mentioned, is 
founded on what are termed his moral miracles. The ingenious writer 
just quoted has said (Fairbairn's Studies, p. 158): "It was no more 
extraordinary to have miraculous powers over nature than to have 
miraculous powers over men. To be the moral being Jesus was, to 
live the life he led, to die as he did, to achieve in man and in 
society the change he has achieved, is to have accomplished miracles 
infinitely greater in kind and quality than those of multiplying the 
loaves and walking on the sea, or even raising the dead." Had Prin- 
cipal Fairbairn said that the former achievements were more valuable 
in themselves, and more worthy of the founder of a great religion, 
we should have assented at once to his proposition. But to say that 
they were greater as miracles than the latter, and to say so, in order 
to suggest that they afforded a reason for believing the latter, derives 
its whole force from the equivocal and schillernd use of the word 
" miracle." The works of the one description, if they really occurred, 
were miracles pure and simple, done without mediation between the 
will of Jesus and the physical effect, "alterations of the ordinary 
successions of natural phenomena due to the power exerted by spiritual 
will over that order" {Spectator, March 31, 1888). The others were 
accomplished according to the operation of psychological law, and 
can be accounted for by the action of mind on mind, by the power 
of sympathy and of the idea. As to the reality of the miracle in 
the one case, if it took place as represented, there can be no doubt; 
in the other case, the presence of a miraculous element is more than 
doubtful. 

These remarks on the miraculous works narrated in the Gospels 
are incomplete and fragmentary, intended only to define our general 
position in regard to them. The subject is discussed more fully 
when we endeavour to explain how such works came to be attri- 
buted to Jesus by the early Church. We proceed now to state our 



APPENDIX. 60 1 

views as to the prophetic utterances which the evangelists place to 
his credit. Some of these, if delivered by him, would go far to 
indicate his possession of a supernatural foreknowledge, but were, 
doubtless, the product of a period subsequent to the events predicted, 
and were only put into his mouth by disciples who regarded the 
prescience of future events as part of his divine equipment, and who, 
consciously or unconsciously, " personated " him under that supposi- 
tion. That he did foresee, and may have foretold, in language more 
or less obscure, some events which lay beyond the ken, and contra- 
dicted the expectations of his followers, is by no means improbable. 
Amid the plaudits of the impulsive but fickle multitude, he may have 
had the presentiment of a violent death at their hands ; and by his 
deep acquaintance with the spiritual forces which slumber in the 
heart of humanity, but which at his call had been awakened into 
activity, he may have anticipated that the seed of the word which 
he had cast into the hearts of his disciples would bring forth an 
abundant harvest, or even that their faith in him would secure to 
them the victory over the world. With prophetic eye he may have 
discerned the general drift of the time, and have predicted disasters 
which were in store for the Jewish nation. But the probability is 
that some of the utterances reported as his by the synoptists, which 
went beyond this and yet were fulfilled, were really vaticinia post 
eventum ascribed to him by his disciples. It has yet further to be 
noted in this connection that the scenery and symbolical apparatus 
of certain of the apparently prophetic passages, as they occur in 
Mark xiii., Matth. xxiv., and Luke xxi., seem to warrant the conjecture 
that they were in part drawn from later Jewish apokalyptic writings 
which have not come down to us. These may be supposed to have 
been written at a time when, if the final catastrophe which befel the 
Jewish state had not arrived, the events which led up to it were in 
progress, and the portents of coming evil were much more legible 
than during the lifetime of Jesus. The class of Jewish writings to 
which we here refer enjoyed a certain prestige of inspiration among 
the early Christians as well as among the Jews themselves, and 
were much studied by those who searched their mystic phraseology 
to obtain some insight into coming events. And as we know that 
several of these Jewish apokalypses were interpolated with Christian 
materials, so it is highly probable that the Christian records may 
have been interpolated with Jewish apokalyptic materials. In an 
often quoted passage, Papias, who wrote in the earlier part of the 
second century, attributed to Jesus the curious and highly fantastic 
prediction that in Messianic times " the earth will bring forth fruit, 



602 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

one producing ten thousand; in the vine there will be a thousand 
branches, and every branch a thousand clusters," and so forth. But 
about thirty years ago, on the discovery of the Apokalypse of Baruch. 
the prediction was found to be a quotation from that Apokalypse : 
a fact which seems to prove that there was a tendency among 
Christians to attribute to Jesus those dreams of the future which 
had established themselves in current belief, how or from what source 
no one could tell. And if we combine with this tendency that other 
tendency to ascribe to Jesus the prediction of events which took 
place after he had left the world, we can easily account for any of 
the prophecies ascribed to him in the Gospels, without calling in 
the idea of supernatural foreknowledge. 

We have said that Jesus must have had a deep insight into our 
spiritual nature, and into the effects which his teaching would pro- 
duce upon it, and, in virtue of this, a prescience of the future 
development of the kingdom of God upon earth. That in saying 
so we occupy safe and unassailable ground is made manifest by that 
parabolic teaching of which he possessed such unique and inimitable 
mastery. His parables bear the unmistakable stamp of genius, and 
show him to have been possessed of an unrivalled gift of insight, 
prior to experience, except indeed it were the inward experience 
of his own soul, or the experience gained in the limited area of his 
own personal surroundings, enabling him to divine the whole future 
course and development of the kingdom of God upon earth, an 
insight to which little has been added by the critical study of inter- 
vening history. Without exaggeration, we may affirm that the general 
course of Church history, and even most of its salient incidents, are 
little else than illustrations of that teaching. Indeed, so much is 
this the case as to have helped to suggest that while some of the 
parables, such as that of the sower, of the grain of mustard seed, 
and of the leaven, are, so to speak, root parables, having all the 
marks of originality and of actual reminiscence of the discourses 
of Jesus ; others again, such as that of the tares, and of the net, are 
derivative, the embodiment of materials drawn from the experiences 
of the early Church, after it had, to hasten its self-extension, relaxed 
its discipline and become a mixed society, not differing in many 
respects from the society around it. These materials may be sup- 
posed to have been thrown by the tradition into the parabolic form, 
of which Jesus had set the example. This may or may not have 
been the case. But that Jesus should have anticipated much of 
that experience, and have had presentiments of events in the near 
and distant future, relating to himself personally and to the fortunes 



APPENDIX. 603 

of his disciples — presentiments which, when recalled to memory by 
those to whom they were communicated, were sufficient to suggest 
to them that he was possessed of an intimate and detailed know- 
ledge far beyond all that he could lay claim to : all this we can 
readily conceive. We can conceive too how his disciples would 
put into his mouth distinct prophecies of events, of his knowledge 
of which they had no doubt; or that they might amplify and give 
definite and precise form to vague hints which he had thrown out 
respecting what was to come. But beyond this we can hardly go. 
The foreknowledge ascribed to him by the evangelists was really, 
to a great extent, the after-knowledge of the evangelists themselves, 
a knowledge after the events, and was at fault, or couched in vague 
and ambiguous language, whenever it went beyond the knowledge 
which they themselves had gained through the intervening history 
and experience of the Church. The predictions regarding his second 
coming on the clouds of heaven, which he is reported to have 
uttered, as they were not fulfilled, so were probably never uttered 
by him, but put into his mouth by the Church at a period when 
there existed a confident assurance, on other grounds, that he was 
so to come again. 

Against the historical evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus 
we content ourselves at present with placing the consideration of its 
supernatural character. The constructive disproof of it, involved in 
the discrepancy of the several accounts of it, and in the fact that the 
faith in it which arose in the Church, can be accounted for otherwise 
than by the supposition of its actual occurrence, receives further 
consideration elsewhere. This is the more necessary, because the 
resurrection of Jesus is not, like atonement or incarnation, a mere 
doctrine resting on authority, or a dogmatic interpretation of facts 
which claims to be inspired, but offers itself to our acceptance as 
itself a fact which fell within the experience and observation of 
many eye-witnesses. On this account, it is by orthodox theo- 
logians regarded as the key to the apologetic position of Christi- 
anity, serving to lend credibility to facts and doctrines, of which 
the independent evidence is not so cogent. Such is the opinion of 
Mr. Hutton, who, concurring with Cardinal Newman, says, " It is 
irrational in the highest degree for any man who is absolutely con- 
vinced of the resurrection of our Lord, to ask for legal proofs of other 
miracles of the same class, and manifesting the same character." The 
justice and force of this reasoning we do not deny. But the question 
here arises whether the proof of the resurrection is so very cogent? 
Giving expression to his own views on this point, as well as to those 



604 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

of Cardinal Newman, Mr. Hutton says that the resurrection of our 
Lord is "supported by an overwhelming amount of proof, at all events 
to all those who begin with a belief in God, and an expectation 
therefore of some manifestation to men of His character and pur- 
poses." These last qualifying words claim careful attention. They 
cover the silent assumption that this expectation can be satisfied only 
by a supernatural manifestation ; that, not being able to find a 
manifestation of God's character and purposes in the slow and regular 
operation of His laws, religious men expect and long for some mani- 
festation by the short cut of supernatural action. Now, the expec- 
tation and craving for " some " manifestation is, we admit, natural, or 
we may say, intrinsic to the religious instinct. But may not that 
instinct overstep its province, and misread its own contents, when it 
expects or demands a supernatural manifestation ? In its inexperience 
or impatience, that instinct may long or clamour for some such, and 
it may even seem to find what it thus seeks. But in its maturity, and 
in the light of science, it expects to find the manifestation which it 
seeks, only in and through the natural laws of the world without, and 
the world within us ; and when, as is now the case, it has arrived 
at this stage, the proof of the resurrection, so far from being over- 
whelming, may by no means be sufficient to overcome the antecedent 
improbability. A less known but far more liberal apologist than 
Newman has courageously asserted that, "for the resurrection of Jesus, 
there is a greater weight of evidence than for almost any other 
received historical fact, and that it is here, and nowhere else, that 
the battle (of Christianity) must be lost or won." Elsewhere we state 
our reasons of dissent from this opinion, and endeavour to show that 
the evidence for the resurrection is by no means conclusive ; and also, 
that the cause of Christianity is not " lost," though Jesus did not rise 
from the dead. Meanwhile we content ourselves with acknowledging 
that whatever may have been the fact, the faith in the fact, if it did 
not lay the foundation of the Christian Church, did certainly give 
stability and distinctness to religious convictions which would otherwise 
have remained vague and fluctuating. 

To reduce, as far as possible, the improbability of the bodily re- 
surrection of Jesus, some curious modes of reasoning have from time 
to time been resorted to by apologists. To one of these, not so much 
because it is plausible, as because it has recently been brought into 
prominence, we shall here devote a few words. It has been said 
(see Spectator, April 4th, 1891) that "the spiritual miracle of the 
crucifixion (regarded as a proof of the supreme self-devotion of Jesus) 
was an indefinitely greater miracle than the physical miracle of the 



APPENDIX. 605 

resurrection — a much more impressive evidence of the actual mingling 
of the divine with the human." Now, it would be somewhat difficult 
to put this reasoning into the syllogistic form, and to make it bear upon 
the credibility of the resurrection. But the meaning is plain, viz., that 
as we believe in the greater miracle of the crucifixion, the lesser 
miracle of the resurrection should give us no difficulty. But we can- 
not admit the force of such reasoning, and we dissent entirely from 
the premiss. No phenomenon like or approaching to the resurrection 
has ever come within human experience. But there are on record 
many examples of heroic devotion akin to that displayed on Calvary. 
Absolute devotion to any cause, good or bad, is not " Jedermann's 
Sache." But every creed has had its martyrs. And we have only to 
think of Paul (Rom. ix. 3), of Francis of Assisi, and of General Gordon, 
to be sure that any of these men would, rather than withhold his 
confession to the truth, have, like Jesus, ascended the cross. And 
every day we may see examples of moral qualities, the same in kind 
with those displayed by Jesus in that terrible ordeal, though incal- 
culably lower in degree. His death, voluntarily undergone, we regard 
as an evidence, not of superhuman virtue, but of the grandeur and 
capabilities of our common humanity. That recourse should be had to 
an argument such as the above only bears witness to the anxiety which 
the resurrection causes to the apologist. And the argument itself is 
but a specimen of a form of reasoning against which we have to 
protest elsewhere in this discussion. 

It will be said that by surrendering our belief in the historical 
fact of the resurrection we let go the only decisive and palpable 
evidence for the survival of the human consciousness after the dis- 
solution of its material vehicle, for the immortality of the soul, or 
even for the existence of an unseen world — the only evidence which 
turns the balance in favour of the affirmative, and lifts the existence 
of a future state out of the class of questions which admit neither of 
proof nor of disproof. It will be said that the mystery and uncertainty 
which hover over these subjects, after being, to all appearance, dis- 
sipated for many generations by the Gospel narratives, will again 
descend upon them and invest them with a gloom all the deeper 
because of the withdrawal of the light to which the Christian world 
had grown accustomed; and that we should once more have to fall 
back upon that hope which has never been extinguished in the human 
breast — a hope, it may be, not a little fortified by the fact that it 
glowed in the soul of him who, of all men, had the deepest religious 
insight, and read, as with open eye, the mind and will of God in 
regard to His children. It may be, indeed, that the religious conscious- 



606 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

ness of Jesus had for its immediate content not so much a belief in 
the continuance of life beyond the grave, as rather the perception 
that the life in God was his present possession. But as no degree 
of submission to the will of heaven could ever reconcile him thoroughly 
to the loss of such a life, he had herein the best possible proof that 
he should never be called upon to resign its conscious enjoyment. 
Yet even for us that loss, great as it may be, would not be altogether 
without compensation, inasmuch as we should thus escape the temp- 
tation to that " other worldliness " which is apt to withdraw our interest 
from present duties, and, above everything else, to divert the religious 
development from its proper course, and to confuse or defile the love 
of righteousness for its own sake with the love of it for the permanence 
and eternity of the rewards which follow in its train. The deeply and 
unfeignedly religious man is one who would love righteousness none 
the less though its blessedness were to be consciously enjoyed only 
for the present life, and though eternity were a qualitative not a 
quantitative predicate of its nature. Respect to a future recompense 
of reward is, not less than respect to a present recompense, a sub- 
ordinate motive for a religious life. And the proper feeling for a 
righteous man is, that if the divine order permit him to live beyond, 
and to retain, after this life is spent, a consciousness of the bliss of 
righteousness and the vision of God, it is well ; but if not, then he 
will be content to enjoy it while he may in the present life, satisfied 
with the brief and transient taste and vision of it, and, if necessary, 
rather to lose life itself than live without the enjoyment of such a 
consciousness. To be absorbed in the discharge of present duty 
without meditating much on the unknown future, may be no mean 
token of the reality and genuineness of the religious life. And if it 
be true that we can neither prove nor disprove a future life; that 
God has spread a veil over it, impenetrable by the highest efforts of 
human reason, it can appear credible only to those who believe that 
human reason has been enfeebled by a primeval fall, that He has 
yet lifted that veil by a special act of Providence; that, He has had 
recourse to extraordinary expedients to make up for a lost capacity — 
for a lapse, of which we can see no evidence. 

It has also to be considered that evidence for a future life might 
only be too strong, going far to destroy the nature of that hope which 
points beyond the present, making it of the nature of sight, and tending 
besides to overpower our interest in the present life, which is the 
proper scene of duty and of trial. The Christian has well been 
compared to a soldier who has to remain at his post, and to engage 
in the fight without knowing the plan of battle or foreseeing its issue. 



APPENDIX. 607 

And though in the long course of Christian history a confident belief 
in the resurrection has had an ennobling and hallowing effect on many 
minds, yet it is a question whether on the average of men the effect 
may not have been prejudicial by shifting the central weight of the 
religious life, and giving an indirect bent to the religious sentiment ; 
estranging the minds of not a {ew, and puzzling the vast majority 
of men to whom religion is a necessity. Yet, though the confident 
belief may be shaken, the undying hope, with its accompaniment of 
quenchless awe remains, carrying with it, just because it is undying, 
an evidence of itself, which waxes as the heart grows in purity. For 
those who have entered into the idea of the Fatherhood of God, and 
have through the Christian belief in the forgiveness of sin submitted 
to the "discipline of heart and soul which are needed for the appre- 
hension of things spiritual," the hope of a future life will receive a 
new confirmation, going far towards its conversion into a steadfast 
assurance. If the idea of that life may no longer be included in the 
region of faith, it need not be excluded from the region of hope. 
For if, through the cosmic and evolutional process, the Great Unseen 
has been able out of the primordial elements to bring beings into 
existence akin to Himself, endowed with the spiritual attributes of 
conscience and a moral sense, may it not be hoped that these same 
beings may be fitted for a life beyond the limits of a finite duration ? 
It is elsewhere shown that the inexplicit sense of the manifestation 
of that higher nature in their Master was what led the first disciples 
to believe in his resurrection from the dead. But one thing is certain, 
that the future life, which thus became the object of Christian hope, 
must depend not on a supernatural action on the part of God, but 
on the divine nature of the soul itself, sustaining its life through the 
strait of death. 



THE END. 



Glasgow: printed at the university press by rouert maclehose. 



v »- v <& X 







v v * " • 



0,°>>"<^c 



- 












V'' » v ^fc 



** rf^ 



W &'. ^ 







^ ^ 







fe, * 



W*%> .*< 
















. 









